among his papers, showed a strange unconscious kind of sense of being near his end. His good-natured friends had said that "but for his unhappy lust for publishing so fast, he might have flourished twenty years or more, though now, alas! poor man, worn out in four." He, however, entreated his friends once more to be charitable, and read, "no easy task, but, probably, the last that I shall ask!" that little poem. He calls it the plain unlaboured Journey of a Day, and closes with the line,

"I on my journey all alone proceed!"

The poem was not meant to close here, but a greater Hand interposed. That line of mournful significance is the last that was written by Churchill !

A sudden desire to see John Wilkes took him hastily to Boulogne, on the 27th of October, 1764. Here, on the 29th, a miliary fever seized him, and bafled the physicians who were called in. The friends who surrounded his bed gave way to extreme distress; but Churchill preserved his composure. He was described afterwards, checking their agitated grief, in the lines with which he had calmly looked forward to this eventful time:

Let no unworthy sounds of grief be heard,
No loud laments, not one unseemly word;
Let sober triumphs wait upon my bier,
I wont forgive that friend who sheds one tear.
Whether he's ravish'd in life's early morn,
Or in old age drops like an ear of corn,
Full ripe he falls, on nature's noblest plan,
Who lives to reason, and who dies a man.

He sat up in bed, and dictated a brief, just will. He then expressed a wish to be removed, that he might die in England; and the imprudent measures of his friends, in compliance with this wish, hastened the crisis. On the 10th of November, 1764, at Boulogne, in the thirty-third year of his age, Charles Churchill breathed his last.

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Warburton said that he had perished of a drunken debauch, a statement wholly untrue. Acton Davies said, his last expression was What a fool I have been!" a statement contradicted by the tenor of his will, and specially denied by Wilkes. What is not to be admired in a satirist, is generally discovered just before or just after his death; what is admired runs equal danger of unseasonable worship. There was a sale of his books and furniture, at which the most extravagant prices were given for articles of no value. A common steel pen brought five pounds, and a pair of plated spurs sixteen guineas. Scandalous stories were forged about him.

"Churchill the poet is dead," wrote Walpole to Sir Horace Mann, on the 15th November. "The meteor blazed scarce four years. He is dead, to the great joy of the ministry and the Scotch, and to the grief of very few, indeed, I believe; for such a friend is not only a dangerous, but a ticklish possession.

There were friends who had not found him so. Lloyd was sitting down to dinner when the intelligence was brought to him. He was seized with a sudden sickness, and thrust away his plate untouched. "I shall follow poor Charles," was all he said, as he went to the bed from which he never rose again. Churchill's favourite sister, Patty, who was at this time betrothed to Lloyd, sank next under the double blow, and, in a few short weeks, joined her brother and her lover. The poet had asked that none should mourn for him, and here were two broken hearts offered up at his grave! Other silent and bitter sorrows were also there.

We pass over the affected grief of Wilkes at the cruel blow. "The death of dear Churchill," he said; "many a sigh and tear escape me for the death of dear Churchill." "You see how much I have at heart to show the world how I loved Churchill." "I am adequate to every affliction but the death Churchill." He promised to edit his works, too; but all he did was nil. He wrote a few paltry notes, but they came to nothing. But the year after the sad scene at Boulogne, the Abbé Winckleman gave him an antiqué sepulchral urn of alabaster, and he placed on it a Latin inscription to his friend's memory; and this he set up in the grounds of his Isle of Wight cottage, but he did no more.

Meanwhile, in accordance with his own request, the body of Churchill had been brought over from France, and buried in the old churchyard which once belonged to the collegiate church of St. Martin, at Dover. There is now a tablet to his memory in the church, and over the place of burial a stone inscribed with his name and age, the date of his death, and a line taken from that most manly and unaffected passage of his poetry, in which, without sorrow or complaining, he anticipates this humble grave:

"Let all (nor shall rosentment flush my cheek)
Who know me well, what they know, freely speak;

So those (the greatest curse I meet below)

Who know me not, may not pretend to know.
Let none of those, who, bless'd with parts above

My feeble genius, still I dare to love,
Doing more mischief than a thousand foes,
Posthumous nonsense to the world expose,
And call it mine; for mine, though never known,
Or which, if mine, I living blush'd to own.

Know all the world, no greedy heir shall find,
Die when I will, one couplet left behind,
Let none of those whom I despise, though great,
Pretending friendship to give malice weight,
Publish my life. Let no false sneaking Peer
(Some such there are), to win the public ear,
Hand me to shame, with some vile anecdote,
Nor soul-gall'd Bishop damn me with a note.
Let one poor sprig of bay around my head
Bloom whilst I live, and point me out when dead :
Let it (may Heaven, indulgent, grant that prayer!)
Be planted on my grave, nor wither there

And when, on travel bound, some rhyming guest

Roams through the churchyard whilst his dinner's drest,
Let it hold up this comment to his eyes,

Life to the last enjoyed, Here Churchill lies:
Whilst (oh what joy that pleasing flattery gives !)

Reading my works, he cries, Here Churchill lives."

On "travel bound," a "rhyming guest" stood at the grave in the Dover churchyard fifty years after this pathetic aspiration. He, too, had lived in defiance of the world's opinions; had written the most masterly satires; had achieved a popularity unattained by any English poet since the grave at which he stood received its inhabitant; like him, was now leaving his native country, in early manhood, to be brought back dead; and the moral to which he shaped his thoughts, was on "the Glory and the Nothing of a Name." But a Name is not an illusion when it has been won by any strenuous exertion, either of thought or action, in an honest purpose. Time's purgatorial fire may weaken the strength of the characters it is written in, but it eats out of them also their mistakes and vices; and Byron might have had greater hope for the living, and less pity for the dead, at the grave of Charles Churchill.Edinburgh Review, No. 163.

FIELDING'S "AMELIA."

Alderman Cadell, the publisher, told Sir Nathaniel Wraxall that his predecessor, Millar, bought of Fielding the copyright of his Amelia for 800l., a great sum at that time. After making the purchase, Millar showed the manuscript to Sir Andrew Mitchell, requesting to have his opinion of the work. Sir Andrew observed to him that it bore the indelible marks of Fielding's genius, and was a fine performance; nevertheless, far beneath Tom Jones; and finally desired Millar to get rid of it as soon as he could. This counsel he took, though he was too able a man to divulge the opinion of his friend. On the contrary, at the first sale which he made to the bookselling trade, he said: "Gentlemen, I have several works to

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put up, for which I shall be glad if you will bid; but as to Amelia, every copy is bespoke." This manoeuvre had its effect: the booksellers were anxious to get their names put down for copies of it, and the edition, though very large, was immediately sold.

DR. YOUNG'S POETRY.

A little after Dr. Young had published his "Universal Passion," the Duke of Wharton made him a present of two thousand pounds for it; when a friend of the Duke's, who was surprised at the largeness of the present, cried out, on hearing it, "What! two thousand pounds for a poem ?" The Duke smiled, and said, "It was the best bargain he ever made in his life, for it was fairly worth four thousand.”

When the Doctor was deeply engaged in writing one of his tragedies, the Duke made him a very different kind of present. He procured a human scull, fixed a candle in it, and gave it to the Doctor as the most proper lamp for him to write tragedy by.

RICHARDSON'S NOVELS.

High as Richardson's reputation stood in his own country, it was even more exalted in those of France and Germany, whose imaginations are more easily excited, and their passions more easily moved, by tales of fictitious distress, than are the cold-blooded English. Foreigners of distinction have been known to visit Hampstead, and to inquire for the Flask Walk, distinguished as a scene in Clarissa's history, just as travellers visit the rocks of Mellerie to view the localities of Rousseau's tale of passion. Diderot vied with Rousseau in heaping incense upon the shrine of the English author. The former compared him to Homer, and predicts for his memory the same honours which are rendered to the father of epic poetry; and the last, besides his well-known burst of eloquent panegyric, records his opinion in a letter to D'Alembert: On n'a jamais fait encore, en quelque langue que ce soit, de roman égal à Clarisse, ni même approchant." (Sir Walter Scott.) But Lord Byron could not, he said, read Clarissa.

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However, Richardson's popularity in England was very great. He tells us that he "slid into the writing of Pamela" in the following manner: "Two booksellers, my particular friends, entreated me to write for them a volume of letters, in a common style, on such subJects as might be of use to those country readers who were unable to indite for themselves. Will it be any harm,' said I, 'in a piece you want to be written so low, if we should instruct them how they should think and act in common cases, as well as indite? They

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were the more urgent with me to begin the volume for this hint. I set about it; and in the progress of it, writing two or three letters to instruct handsome girls, who were obliged to go out to service, as we phrase it, how to avoid the snares that might be laid against their virtue, the above story recurred to my thought; and hence sprung Pamela." When the work first appeared, in 1740, it was received with a burst of applause; Dr. Sherlock recommended it from the pulpit, Mr. Pope said it would do more good than volumes of sermons; and another literary oracle declared, that if all other books were to be burnt, Pamela and the Bible should be preserved. "Even at Ranelagh,' " Mrs. Barbauld assures us, "it was usual for the ladies to hold up the volumes to one another, to show they had got the book that every one was talking of." And, what will appear still more extraordinary, one gentleman declares that he will give it to his son, as soon as he can read, that he may have an early impression of virtue. Indeed, the success of Clarissa_and_Grandison procured Richardson praise and admiration from nearly all quarters.

He bought a pleasant retreat in the suburbs of London, then far more rural than in the present day; and it was in seeking this retreat of the novelist, that Sir Richard Phillips found a very different knowledge of Richardson's fame, of which the worthy Knight used to relate, with much glee, the following:

"A widow kept a public-house near the corner of North-end-lane, about two miles from Hyde Park-corner, where she had lived about fifty years; and I wanted to determine the house in which Samuel Richardson, the novelist, had resided in North-end-lane. She remembered his person, and described him as a round, short gentleman, who most days passed her door,' and she said she used to serve his family with beer. He used to live and carry on his business,' said I, in Salisbury-square."* As to that,' said she, 'I know nothing, for I never was in London.' 'Never in London ?' said I; 'and in health, with the free use of your limbs ?' 'No,' replied the woman; 'I had no business there, and had enough to do at home.' Well, then,' I observed, 'you know your own neighbourhood the better-which was the house of Mr. Richardson, in the next lane?' 'I don't know,' she replied; 'I am, as I told you, no traveller. I never was up the lane-I only know that he did live somewhere up the lane.' 'Well,' said I, but living in Fulham parish, you go to

* Richardson wrote his Pamela, and printed his novels, on premises with a frontage in Salisbury-square, the house being at the top of the court, now No. 76, Fleetstreet. Goldsmith was once Richardson's reader, and here the latter was visited by Hogarth, Dr. Johnson, Dr. Young; Secker, Archbishop of Canterbury; and Mrs. Barbauld, when a playful child.-Curiosities of London, p. 306.