son, and gratify those who did. In the following sketch, necessarily a brief one, we shall confine our notice to one portion of the diary-that which relates to the writer of it; and by so doing we shall take one moiety of the editor's plan for our precedent or excuse.

In the execution of his task,' he writes that he has kept 'two objects especially in view; first, to preserve interesting particulars respecting distinguished men, both in England and on the Continent: and, secondly, to keep unbroken the thread of Mr. Robinson's own life.' Of Goethe and Wordsworth and the long beadroll of his acquaintances-some of them 'men famous to all times,' we shall say little, but endeavour to keep Mr. Robinson himself the centre-figure of the remarkable groups in which he is set, but almost at times obscured and overlaid in the setting.

He held, and in some respects justly and with a happy instinct, his vocation in life to be that of a medium of communication between persons otherwise not likely to meet, understand, or properly esteem one another, nor did he deny that he had served as a missionary of literature, introducing, among other instances, Goethe and Jean Paul to Englishmen, and Wordsworth and Lamb to Germans. He expressed his opinion on this subject about six weeks before his death:

He met Mr. Macmillan, the publisher of these volumes, who, as they were going down to lunch, gave him his arm, and said, Mr. Robinson, I wonder that you have never been induced to undertake some great literary work.' Mr. Robinson stopped, and, placing his hand on Mr. Macmillan's shoulder, answered, 'It is because I am a I early found that I had not the literary ability to give me such a place among English authors as I should have desired; but I thought that I had an opportunity of gaining a knowledge of many of the most distinguished men of the age, and that I might do some good by keeping a record of my interviews with them.'

wise man.

This disclaimer of 'literary ability' will excite a smile, or more probably a sigh, in all who were intimate with Mr. Robinson, more especially if they recollect how many rush in where he feared to tread. Perhaps the words 'such a place among English authors as I should have desired' require a passing comment. To some they may savour of pride: their real import is, unless we greatly mistake his character, reverence for literature, and aversion to needless multiplying of books. Be the interpretation what it may, we heartily commend this example of diffidence to all persons intending to print, and to many whose names are already in publishers' catalogues.

Of his Reminiscences he used to say to his executors, 'If you were to print all that you find, I should think you would show great want of judgment; and I should think the same of you if you came to the conclusion that there is nothing worth printing.'

For the sake of those who may not have these volumes before them we add the following account of the materials with which the editor has constructed them. They are:

1. Brief journals reaching as far as 1810 diary begun in 1811, and continued till inclusive; 2. A regular and full home within five days of Mr. Robinson's death, forming thirty-five closely written volumes; 3. About thirty volumes of journals of tours; 4. Reminiscences reaching down to the year 1843, inclusive; 5. Miscellaneous papers; 6. A large number of letters.

From the year 1811 the diary is entitled to the most prominent place. The reminiscences were not begun till Mr. Robinson had nearly reached threescore years and ten; and even if they had been written in the freshness of his memory, and in the fullness of his mental vigour, they would still hardly have had equal value with the

daily record, which breathes the air of the

scenes and incidents to which it relates.

The diary comprises more than eighty years of reminiscences, opening with the writer's childhood and school-days: indeed, as the following entry shows, he commences to

journalise vicariously in his fourth year:

In general, it is not easy to fix a date to the earliest recollections. My mother's pocket-books supply a few. The very earliest that I am aware of is the being taken out one night in the arms of the nurse to see an illumination. I recollect being frightened at the report of a gun, and that advantage was taken of my crying to carry me home. Now, my mother writes under February 15th, 1779, The town (Bury St. Edmund's) illuminated in honour of Admiral Keppel.' I was then three years and

nine months old, being born May 13th,

1775

an

The town was illuminated in celebration of Admiral Keppel's acquittal from the charges brought against him by Sir Hugh Palliser event which, owing quite as much to political circumstances at the time, as to the defendant's real merits, threw England into a brief spasm of bonfire-gratitude. One of Crabb Robinson's most esteemed and most celebrated friends, in an essay of Elia, couples the name of Keppel with such small politics' in those days. Lamb, a few months the older, might have similar reasons for recalling London illuminated.

It is difficult to grasp without considerable mental effort the full import of eighty years of reminis cence. To be born in one world, to die in another, is, in the case of very old people, scarcely a figure of speech. The world in which the earliest days of Mr. Robinson were spent, was nearly as unlike the world in which he drew his last breath, as the maps studied by Columbus were to the maps now published by Weld or Johnston. The transitions from one to another phase of society may be so gentle as to be scarcely noted at the moment, but the sum of them is, to the eye of contemplation, enormous, and, in Mr. Robinson's case, the transitions witnessed by him were sometimes violent, and often important, either as the beginning or the end of social epochs.

I recollect [he writes] that it was while I was at school at Mr. Crabb's that the French Revolution broke out, that every one rejoiced in it as an event of great promise, and that Popery and absolute government were both to be destroyed. Though I had no proper political knowledge, yet I had strong party feelings. In my childhood I had always heard the Church spoken of as an unjust institution, and thought Dissenters a persecuted body.

name,

He was a scion of an old Nonconformist family, Independents in ingly by no means bigoted disciples Calvinists in creed, but seemof the fervid and logical John of Geneva. His religious opinions he traced directly to his mother's instructions. 'Her orthodoxy,' he says, was indisputable,' yet she scarcely protested when her brother and his son became Arians or Unitarians. The charity, as well as the theology of the son, was apparently derived from this excellent mother.

In 1775, and for more than half a century later, not to be a member of the Church of England was at tended by sundry social inconve niences. At the present moment the angles of disagreement in theology are pretty well rounded off, or the grounds of difference are transferred from creeds and articles of faith to the vestment of the priest or the draping of the altar. The presence of an Arian or Unitarian in the House of Lords would not now discompose a single bishop, and the Speaker of the House of Com mons may dissent from the opinions of his chaplain, without eliciting & remark from Newdegate or Whalley. But such indifference was unknown in 1775. A dissenter from the only possible church, as it was then esteemed by those who enjoyed its privileges, was socially a kind of pariah. He was excluded from the Universities, he could not be an alderman, and if a good-tempered or indolent vestry appointed him churchwarden, the squire or the parson, and most likely both, considered the Establishment in danger.

Of a few dissidents, such as Isaac Watts or Philip Doddridge, good Churchmen, with much condescension, would say, cum tales sint, utinam nostri essent;' but such desire for Christian fellowship was

rare.

And the circle of the church rarely osculated with that of the chapel. The Robinson family became Unitarians, and Unitarians were viewed with alarm or suspicion both by those who held that bishops only can confer spiritual gifts, and by those who thought that presbyters were competent for the imposition of hands. The alarm was doubtless inflamed by the fact that the Unitarian body then possessed divines and collegiate professors of remarkable learning and ability. The names of Lardner, Gilbert Wakefield, and Joseph Priestley were bruited abroad as widely as those of Porteus, Blair, Watson, and Paley. 'The redoubtable philosopher of Birmingham,' as Gibbon termed Priestley, had distinguished himself in a theological duel with Bishop Horsley, and after an exchange of polemical amenities, each of the combatants had retired with credit, and the sentence of the umpire once again was, 'et vitula tu dignus et hic.'

The active and at that time the fervid temperament of Crabb Robinson could not indeed be confined within the boundaries of any denomination. His sympathies and affections demanded a more generous diet than theological propositions could supply, and he strayed into wide regions of political and social speculation. If there were at that time a man in Britain whom, next to Thomas Paine, all rightminded people desired to stone, that man was William Godwin. His Political Justice was accounted not less an enormity than Hobbes's Leviathan, than Locke's Reasonableness of Christianity, or Rousseau's Lettres de la Montagne, had been in their re

spective seasons, or than every book that troubles the pools of received opinions will always be considered to the end of time. We cannot now enter fully into the feelings excited by The Political Justice at the date of its publication in 1793 and for several years after. We have supped full with' doctrines which might have startled its author himself. The theories of Godwin have been transplanted into other soils; some of them have withered, others borne fruit a hundred-fold, and yet the frame of the social world is still in tolerable repair.

Not so thought Crabb Robinson. He thus describes his first acquaintance with The Political Justice:

It was in the spring of this year (1795) that I read a book which gave a turn to my mind, and in effect directed the whole course of my life-a book which, after producing a powerful effect on the youth of that generation, has now sunk into unme

rited oblivion. This was Godwin's Poli

tical Justice. I was in some measure prepared for it by an acquaintance with Holcroft's novels, and it came recommended to me by the praise of Catherine Buck (afterwards wife of Thomas Clarkson). I entered fully into its spirit; it left all others behind, in my estimation, and I was willing even to become a martyr for it; for it soon became a reproach to be a follower of Godwin, on account of his supposed atheism. I never became an atheist, but I could not feel aversion or contempt towards G. on account of any of his views. In one respect the book had an excellent effect on I had never before, nor, I am afraid, have mind-it made me feel more generously. I ever since, felt so strongly the duty of not living to one's self, but of having for one's sole object the good of the community.

my

I

His idea of justice I then adopted, and still retain; nor was I alarmed by the declamations so generally uttered against his opinions on the obligations of gratitude, the fulfilment of promises, and the duties arising out of the personal relations of life. I perceived then the difference between principles as universal laws, and maxims of conduct as prudential rules. But one practical effect of Godwin's book was to make me less inclined to follow the law, or any other profession, as a means of livelihood. I determined to practise habits of rigid economy, and then I thought my small income would suffice with such additions as might be gained by literature.