Partridge sat in fearful expectation of this; and now when the ghost made his next appearance, Partridge cried out: "There, sir, now; what say you now? is he firightened now or no? As much frightened as you think me, and, to be sure, nobody can help some fears, I would not be in so bad a condition as-what's his name?-Squire Hamlet is there, for all the world. Bless me! what's become of the spirit? As I am a living soul, I thought I saw him sink into the earth.' 'Indeed you saw right,' answered Jones. 'Well, well,' cries Partridge, 'I know it is only a play; and besides, if there was anything in all this, Madam Miller would not laugh so; for, as to you, sir, you would not be afraid, I believe, if the devil was here in person. There, there; ay, no wonder you are in such a passion ; shake the vile wicked wretch to pieces. If she was my own mother, I should serve her so. To be sure all duty to a mother is forfeited by such wicked doings. Ay, go about your business; I hate the sight of you.' Our critic was now pretty silent till the play which Hamlet introduces before the king. This he did not first understand, till Jones explained it to him; but he no sooner entered into the spirit of it, than he began to bless himself that he had never committed murder. Then turning to Mrs. Miller, he asked her: 'If she did not imagine the king looked as if he was touched; though he is,' said he 'a good actor, and doth all he can to hide it. Well, I would not have so much to answer for as that wicked man there hath, to sit upon a much higher chair than he sits upon. No wonder he ran away; for your sake I'll never trust an innocent face again.' The grave-digging scene next engaged the attention of Partridge, who expressed much surprise at the number of skulls thrown upon the stage. To which Jones answered: "That it was one of the most famous burial-places about town.' 'No wonder, then,' cries Partridge, 'that the place is haunted. But I never saw in my life a worse grave-digger. I had a sexton when I was clerk that should have dug three graves while he is digging one. The fellow handles a spade as if it was the first time he had one in his hand. Ay, ay, you may sing. You had rather sing than work, I believe.' Upon Hamlet's taking up the skull, he cried out: 'Well! it is strange to see how fearless some men are: I never could bring myself to touch anything belonging to a dead man on any account. He seemed frightened enough too at the ghost, I thought. Nemo omnibus horis sapit.' Little more worth remembering occurred during the play; at the end of which Jones asked him which of the players he had liked best. To this he answered, with some appearance of indignation at the question: "The king without doubt.' 'Indeed, Mr. Partridge,' says Mrs. Miller, 'you are not of the same opinion with the town: for they are all agreed that Hamlet is acted by the best player who ever was on the stage.' 'He the best player!' criel Partridge, with a contemptuous sneer; 'why, I could act as well as he myself. I am sure if I had seen a ghost, I should have looked in the very same manner, and done just as he did. And then, to be sure, in that scene, as you called it, between him and his mother, where you told me he acted so fine, why, Lord help me! any man-that is, any good man-that had such a mother, would have done exactly the same. I know you are only joking with me; but, indeed, madam, though I was never at a play in London, yet I have seen acting before in the country; and the king for my money; he speaks all his words distinctly, half as loud again as the other. Anybody may see he is an actor.' Thus ended the adventure at the playhouse, where Partridge had afforded great mirth, not only to Jones and Mrs. Miller, but to all who sat within hearing, who were more atten tive to what he said than to anything that passed on the stage. He durst not go to bed all that night for fear of the ghost; and for many nights after, sweated two or three hours before he went to sleep with the same apprehensions, and waked several times in great horrors, crying out: 'Lord have mercy upon us! there it is.' Amelia (1751), a character sketched from his own wife. Captain Booth, Amelia's husband is irregular, extravagant, a bad manager, a victim to temptation, but a sincere penitent; is instinctively generous, as a dog is instinctively affectionate; has a woman's heart in his soldier's body; is devoted to his wife, weeps at thought of her, treasures her words, loves her supremely, with a perennial warmth: 'If I had the world, I was ready to lay it at my Amelia's feet; and so Heaven knows, I would ten thousand worlds." Amelia is, according to Fielding's idea, the assembly of domestic virtues. She is tender, forgiving, and excessively modest; says, 'Dear Billy, though my understanding be much inferior to yours;' receives a love-letter, throws it away, and says: 'I would not have such a letter in my possession for the universe; I thought my eyes contaminated with reading it.' Style. Fresh, vigorous, easy, idiomatic, exhibiting a care and refinement altogether unknown to that of Richardson. Rank. A masterly observer and painter of human nature as he witnessed it. What he has given us is for the most part his actual experience, illuminated, of course, by his own genius. He declares that if he imagines a feature, it is because he has seen it. He lived through the scenes and characters he has described; saw the world in its hilarity, coarseness, and brutality; saw natural impulse unveiled; saw the turmoil of vanities, follies, lusts, and rancors, naked and cloaked; saw men of nerve and muscle, full of warmth and force, with overflowing instincts, jostling and violent, yet liberal, loyal, and joyous. Of what he saw, he drew living pictures. Here lies his pre-eminence. He announced that his object was faithfully to paint real life. But in doing so, he gathered the harvest and forgot the flowers. Life has its poetry, as well as its prose; its moral heroism, as well as its physical valor; its visions, as well as its bread. Of these less solid and loftier constituents, he had but slight appreciation. Hence his characters are strongly-built rather than refined. As a mere observer, he was superior to Richardson and little inferior to Shakespeare, though without any of the poetical qualities of either. Width of sympathy, delicacy of perception, high cast of thought, are wanting. He is the novelist of the lower million; Richardson, of the upper ten thousand. He teaches morality indirectly, in the comic style, which, he maintained, disposes men to be more full of good humor and benevolence;' Richardson, directly, in the serious, tragic style, for by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better. If the novel be held to include love, satire, humor, observation, genuine portrayal of facts, of living veritable persons, and skill in the arrangement of plot and incident, he surpasses Richardson, and perhaps is unsurpassed by any other; if, more justly, the ethical tendency, the predominance of character, is the leading index of power in the novelist, to Richardson must be assigned the seat of honor. 1 Character. Sanguine, affectionate, extravagant, careless, jolly; a drinker, a roysterer, acquainted with the lower orders of all classes, and familiar with the ups and downs of life. His views were those which commend themselves to a man who sees the world as it is, who has no visionary dreams or passionatè aspirations, and who has a thoroughly generous nature. Morality, with him, was not a law; yet in his way, he was a moralist. He satirizes vice, excuses, condemns, suggests moral conclusions. His hero is neither a libertine nor an ascetic; he is a fullblooded healthy animal, with respect for the Church so long as it does not break with common sense, but without exaltation or poetic rapture. The novelist, pre-eminently of authors, records himself in his writings. Not more decisively does a Chinese drawing reveal its nationality than do the works of his imagination reveal the experience and observation out of which that imagination has grown. His heroes and heroines are his ideals, and these must be built of the idealized materials of his actual life and history. Perhaps he had all the best parts of a man, except delicacy and moderation. Influence. Probably his only legacy to mankind, certainly his chief one, is the picture he has set before us of English society in his generation. We see pretty much what we should have seen as lookers-on. In vindicating the novel against the loftier pretensions of professed historians, he asserted that 'in their productions nothing is true but the names and dates, whereas in mine everything is true but the names and dates.' Without going so far, as the novel embodies substantially the remarks of the ablest observers upon their contemporaries, we may admit his claim to be a writer of history, who, more faithfully than many historians proper, has given us the very form and pressure of the times. In his own age, when coarseness was less offensive, he did, as a humorist, the good that mere pleasure can do. His humor, however, is in this age situated where those who are refined or well dressed will not care to enter. In this direction, as in others, his influence has ceased to be felt. This is the criterion of a truly great man,—that his life has been deepened and chastened by sorrow, enabling him to discern the inner heart of things, so that there rises out of him a kind of universal Psalm; his thought is in our thoughts, and the fruit of his genius scatters its seed across continents and centuries. HUME. Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.-Adam Smith. Biography.-Born in Edinburgh 1711, and educated at Edinburgh University; was designed for the law, studied, but never practiced. He had an insurmountable aversion to every thing but literature: 'While they (the family) fancied I was pouring upon Voet and Vinnius, Cicero and Virgil were the authors which I was secretly devouring.' His slender fortune and impaired heath-the result of a too ardent application-forced him to try mercantile life, but in a few months he found this employment equally uncongenial. He then went to France, studied three years in retirement, living with the utmost frugality, and returned in 1737. His patrimony hardly sufficient for his support, he became tutor one year to a young nobleman of deranged mind; next became a candidate for the professorship of moral philosophy in his native university, but was unsuccessful: 'I am informed that such a popular clamor has been raised against me in Edinburgh, on account of scepticism, heterodoxy, and other hard names, which confound the ignorant, that my friends find some difficulty in working out the point of my professorship, which once appeared so easy.' He then became secretary, two years, to General St. Clair, attending him first in an expedition against Canada, afterwards in an embassy to the courts of Vienna and Turin: These two years were almost the only interruptions which my studies have received during the course of my life: I passed them agreeably, and in good company; and my appointments, with my frugality, had made me reach a fortune which I called independent, though most of my friends were inclined to smile when I said so: in short, I was now master of near a thousand pounds.' Wrote industriously, as had been his habit; published, was neglected, but pressed on: 'On my return from Italy (1749), I had the mortification to find all England in a ferment on account of Dr. Middleton's Free Inquiry, while my performance was entirely overlooked and neglected. A new edition which had been published in London, of my Essays, moral and political, met not with a much better reception. 'Such is the force of natural temper, that these disappointments made little or no impression on me.' In 1752, he was chosen librarian to the Faculty of Advocates, and, placed in command of a large library, struck into the path of historical writing. In 1763, he attended Lord Hertford on his embassy to Paris,. where he was received with marked distinction. Three years later, he returned to his native city, with the view of burying himself in a philosophical retreat, but was induced to accept the office of Under-secretary of State, which he held for two years: 'I returned to Edinburgh in 1769, very opulent (for I possessed a revenue of one thousand pounds a year), healthy, and, though somewhat stricken in years, with the prospect of enjoying long my ease, and of seeing the increase of my reputation.' Here he lived in the tranquil enjoyment of his fame, and in the affection of his personal friends. In the spring of 1775, he was struck with what he knew to be a mortal and incurable disease, and, with the utmost composure, awaited his speedy dissolution. While his person declined, his spirits were unabated. He possessed the same assiduity in study, and the same gayety in company: 'I consider, besides, that a man of 65, by dying, cuts off only a few years of infirmities; and though I see many symptoms of my literary reputation's breaking out at last with additional lustre, I know that I could have but few years to enjoy it. It is difficult to be more detached from life than I am at present.' Sensible that he was sinking, he diverted himself with the revision of his works, with books of amusement, with an occasional game of whist in the evening. His cheerfulness was so great, that many could not believe he was dying. He was perfectly resigned, free from anxiety or impatience. Reading, shortly before his death, Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead, he said that, among all the excuses alleged to Charon* for not entering readily into his boat, he could find none that fitted himself: he had no house to complete, no daughter to provide for, no enemies to be revenged upon : 'I could not well imagine,' said he, 'what excuse I could make to Charon in order to obtain a little delay. I have done every thing of consequence which I ever meant to do; and I could at no time expect to leave my relations and friends in a better situation than that in which I am now likely to leave them: I, therefore, have all reason to die contented.' He invents jocular excuses, which he supposes may be made to Charon, and imagines the very surly answers which it may suit the character of the grim ferryman to return: The ferryman in Greek mythology, who for a halfpenny carries across the Stygian lake the souls of the dead that flock to its shores: There Charon stands, who rules the dreary coasts; A sordid god: down from his hoary chin A length of beard descends, uncomb'd, unclean; His eyes like hollow furnaces on fire; A girdle foul with grease binds his obscene attire. He spreads his canvass, with his pole he steers; The frights of flitting ghosts in his thin bottom bears. He look'd in years, yet in his years were seen |