seilles

along the Mediterranean, and which so many travellers now know by the delights of the Cornice Road and Monaco, and Mentone, and San Remo. The little fishing village where years ago Lord Brougham set up his Villa of Louise Eléonore (after a darling and lost child) is now a suburb of the fashionable resort of Cannes. his home there, amongst the olives, the oleanders and the orange-trees, the disappointed and petulant ex-chancellor passed most of the later years of his life.

At

Friends dropping in upon him- much doubting of their reception - found him as the humors changed, peevish with strong regrets and recriminations, or placid under the weight of his years, and perhaps narcotized by the marvellous beauty of the scenes around him.

He was over ninety at his death in 1868. To the very last, a man not to be reckoned on: some days as calm as the sea that rippled under his window; other days full of his old unrest and petulancies. There are such men in all times and in all societies-sagacious, fussy, vain, indefatigable, immensely serviceable, cantankerous;

FORECAST OF FUTURE TOPICS.

III

we can't get on without them; we are for ever wishing that we could.

In our next chapter we shall come upon a critic, who was a famous editor — adroit, strong, waspish, bookish, and ignoble. We shall encounter a king, too- of whom we have thus far only had glimpses —who was jolly-excellently limbed and conditioned physically — a man “of an infinite jest,” too, and yet as arrant a dastard — by all old-fashioned moral measures of character as Falstaff himself. Again we shall follow traces of a great poet-but never a favorite one who has left markings of his career, strong and deep; a man who had a Greek's delight in things of beauty, and a Greek's subtlety of touch; but one can fancy a faun's ears showing their tips upon his massive head, and (without fancy) grow conscious of a heathenism clouding his great culture. Other two poets of lighter mould we shall meet; —more gracious, lighter pinioned - prettily flitting - iridescent grace and sparkle in their utterances,

but leaving no strong markings "upon the sands of time."

CHAPTER IV.

E have wandered much in our two last

chapters beyond what may be reckoned strictly English lands, into that pleasant region lying between the Tweed and the Firth of Forth; and it was north of the heights of Lammermuir and of the Pentland Hills, and in that delightful old city which is dominated by the lesser heights of the Salisbury crags, the Castle Rock, and Calton Hill, that we found the builders of that great Review, which in its livery of buff and blue still carries its original name. I traced the several careers of Sydney Smith, Lord Brougham, and Judge Jeffrey; the first of these, from a humble village curacy, coming to be one of the most respected literary men of England, and an important official of St. Paul's Cathedral; if his wit had been less lively he

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WILLIAM GIFFORD.

113

might have risen to a bishopric. Brougham was, first, essayist, then advocate, then Parliamentary orator, then Reformer, then Lord High Chancellor-purging the courts of much legal trumpery — always a scold and quarreller, and gaining in the first year of William IV. his barony of Brougham and Vaux: hence the little squib of verse, which will help to keep his exact title in mind:

"Why is Lord Brougham like a sweeping man

That close by the pavement walks?

Because when he's done all the sweep that he can
He takes up his Broom and Valks!"

As for Jeffrey, he became by his resolute industry and his literary graces and aptitudes one of the most admired and honored critics of Great Britain.

Gifford and His Quarterly.

Our start-point to-day is on the Thames — in that devouring city of London, which very early in the century was laying its tentacles of growth on all the greenness that lay between Blackwall and Bayswater, and which—athwart the Thames

shores-strode blightingly from Clapham to

Hackney.

It was, I believe, in the year 1809 that Mr. John Murray, the great publisher of London stirred, perhaps, by some incentive talk of Walter Scott, or of other good Tory penmen, and emulous of the success which had attended Jeffrey's Review in the north, established a rival one-called simply The Quarterly-intended to represent the Tory interests as unflinchingly and aggressively as the Edinburgh had done Whig interests. The first editor was a William Gifford * (a name worth remembering among those of British critics), who was born in Devonshire. He was the son of a dissolute house-painter, and went to sea in his young

* William Gifford, b. 1757; d. 1826. I give the birth-date named by himself in his autobiography, though the new National Dictionary of Biography gives date of 1756. Gifford - though not always the best authority — ought to have known the year when he was born.

Ed. Quarterly Review, 1809-1824; Juvenal, 1802; Ben Jonson, 1816.

Some interesting matter concerning the early life of Gifford may be found in Memoirs of John Murray, vol. 1, pp. 127 et seq.