eye with a certain gaiety of person. He brought with him no sombre recollections of tragedy. He had not to expiate the fault of having pleased before hand in lofty declamation. He had no sins of Hamlet or of Richard to atone for. His failure in these parts was a passport to success in one of so opposite a tendency. But as far as I could judge, the weighty sense of Kemble made up for more personal incapacity than he had to answer for. His harshest tones in this part came steeped and dulcified in good humour. He made his defects a grace. His exact declamatory manner, as he managed it, only served to convey the points of his dialogue with more precision. It seemed to head the shafts to carry them deeper. Not one of his sparkling sentences was lost. I remember minutely how he delivered each in succession, and cannot by any effort imagine how any of them could be altered for the better. No man could deliver brilliant dialogue-the dialogue of Congreve or of Wycherley -because none understood it-half so well as John Kemble. His Valentine, in Love for Love, was, to my recollection, faultless. He flagged sometimes in the intervals of tragic passion. He would slumber over the level parts of an heroic character. His Macbeth has been known to nod. But he always seemed to me to be particularly alive to point ed and witty dialogue. The relaxing levities of tragedy have not been touched by any since him-the play ful court-bred spirit in which he condescended to the players in Hamletthe sportive relief which he threw into the darker shades of Richarddisappeared with him. Tragedy is become a uniform dead weight. They have fastened lead to her buskins. She never pulls them off for the ease of a moment. To invert a commonplace from Niobe, she never forgets herself to liquefaction. John had his sluggish moods, his torpors-but they were the halting stones and resting places of his tragedy-politic savings, and fetches of the breathhusbandry of the lungs, where nature pointed him to be an economist -rather, I think, than errors of the judgment. They were, at worst, less painful than the eternal tormenting unappeasable vigilance, the "lidless dragon eyes," of present fashionable tragedy. The story of his swallowing opium pills to keep him lively upon the first night of a certain tragedy, we may presume to be a piece of retaliatory pleasantry on the part of the suffering author. But, indeed, John had the art of diffusing a complacent equable dulness (which you knew not where to quarrel with) over a piece which he did not like, beyond any of his contemporaries. John Kemble had made up his mind early, that all the good tragedies, which could be written, had been written; and he resented any new attempt. His shelves were full. The old standards were scope enough for his ambition. He ranged in them absolute-and "fair in Otway, full in Shakspeare shone." He succeeded to the old lawful thrones, and did not care to adventure bottomry with a Sir Edward Mortimer, or any casual speculator that offered. I remember, too acutely for my peace, the deadly extinguisher which he put upon my friend G.'s "Antonio." G., satiate with visions of political justice (possibly not to be realized in our time), or willing to let the scep tical worldlings see, that his anticipations of the future did not preclude a warm sympathy for men as they are and have been-wrote a tragedy. He chose a story, affecting, romantic, Spanish-the plot simple, without being naked-the incidents uncommon, without being overstrained. Antonio, who gives the name to the piece, is a sensitive young Casti lian, who, in a fit of his country honour, immolates his sister But 1 must not anticipate the catastrophe-the play, reader, is extant in choice English-and you will employ a spare half crown not injudiciously in the quest of it. The conception was bold, and the dénouement-the time and place in which the hero of it existed, considered-not much out of keeping; yet it must be confessed, that it required a delicacy of handling both from the author and the performer, so as not much to shock the prejudices of a modern English audience. G., in my opinion, had done his part. John, who was in familiar habits with the philosopher, had undertaken to play Antonio. Great expectations were formed. A philosopher's first suddenly Antonio, who was the chal. lenged, turning the tables upon the hot challenger Don Gusman (who by the way should have had his sister) play was a new æra. The night arrived. I was favoured with a seat in an advantageous box, between the author and his friend M-. G. sate cheerful and confident. In his friend. baulks his humour, and the pit's rea M.'s looks, who had perused the inanuscript, I read some terror. Antonio in the person of John Philip Kemble at length appeared, starched out in a ruff which no one could dispute, and in most irreproachable mustachios. John always dressed most provokingly correct on these occasions. The first act swept by, solemn and silent. It went off, as G. assured M., exactly as the opening act of a piece the protasis should do. The cue of the spectators was to be mute. The characters were but in their introduction. The passions and the incidents would be developed hereafter. Applause hitherto would be impertinent. Silent attention was the effect all-desirable. Poor M. acquiesced-but in his honest friendly face I could discern a working which told how much more acceptable the plaudit of a single hand (however misplaced) would have been than all this reasoning. The second act (as in duty bound) rose a little in interest; but still John kept his forces under-in policy, as G. would have it-and the audience were most complacently attentive. The protasis, in fact, was scarcely unfolded. The interest would warm in the next act, against which a special incident was provided. M. wiped his cheek, flushed with a friendly perspiration-'tis M's way of showing his zeal-" from every pore of him a perfume falls-" I honour it above Alexander's. He had once or twice during this act joined his palms in a feeble endeavour to elicit a sound ---they emitted a solitary noise without an echo-there was no deep to answer to his deep. G. repeatedly begged him to be quiet. The third act at length brought on the scene which was to warm the piece progressively to the final flaming forth of the catastrophe. A philosophic calm settled upon the clear brow of G. as it approached. The lips of M. quivered. A challenge was held forth upon the stage, and there was promise of a fight. The pit roused themselves on this extraordinary occasion, and, as their manner is, seemed disposed to make a ring, when sonable expectation at the same time, with some speeches out of the new philosophy against duelling. The audience were here fairly caughttheir courage was up, and on the alert a few blows, ding dong, as Rs the dramatist afterwards expressed it to me, might have done the business-when their most exquisite moral sense was suddenly called in to assist in the mortifying negation of their own pleasure. They could not applaud, for disappointment; they would not condemn, for morality's sake. The interest stood stone still; and John's manner was not at all calculated to unpetrify it. It was Christmas time, and the atmosphere furnished some pretext for asthmatic affections. One began to cough-his neighbour sympathised with him-till a cough became epi demical. But when, from being halfartificial in the pit, the cough got frightfully naturalised among the fictitious persons of the drama; and Antonio himself (albeit it was not set down in the stage directions) seemed more intent upon relieving his own lungs than the distresses of the author and his friends, then G. "first knew fear;" and mildly turning to M., intimated that he had not been aware that Mr. K. laboured under a cold; and that the performance might possibly have been postponed with advantage for some nights furtherstill keeping the same serene countenance, while M. sweat like a bull. It would be invidious to pursue the fates of this ill-starred evening. In vain did the plot thicken in the scenes that followed, in vain the dialogue wax more passionate and stirring, and the progress of the sentiment point more and more clearly to the arduous developement which impended. In vain the action was accelerated, while the acting stood still. From the beginning, John had taken his stand; had wound himself up to an even tenor of stately declamation, from which no exigence of dialogue or person could make him swerve for an instant. To dream of his rising with the scene (the common trick of tragedians) was preposterous; for from the onset he had planted himself, as upon a terrace, on an eminence vastly above the audience, and he kept that sublime level to the end. He looked from his throne of elevated sentiment upon the under-world of spectators with a most sovran and becoming contempt. There was excellent pathos delivered out to them: an they would receive it, so; an they would not receive it, so. There was no offence against decorum in all this; nothing to condemn, to damn. Not an irreverent symptom of a sound was to be heard. The procession of verbiage stalked on through four and five acts, no one venturing to pre dict what would come of it, when towards the winding up of the latter, Antonio, with an irrelevancy that seemed to stagger Elvira herself-for she had been coolly arguing the point of honour with him-suddenly whips out a poniard, and stabs his sister to the heart. The effect was, as if a murder had been committed in cold blood. The whole house rose up in clamorous indignation demanding justice. The feeling rose far above hisses. I believe at that instant, if they could have got him, they would : : TO CELIA. Old Fictions say that Love hath eyes, To one our graces all unveil, Yet once it happ'd that, semi-blind, But still he saw thee shine the same, And ever since that morning sun, Toh Kood CONTINUATION OF DR. JOHNSON'S Lives of the Poets. No. VI. THE LIFE OF JAMES BEATTIE. JAMES BEATTIE was born on the 25th of October, 1735, at Laurencekirk, in the county of Kincardine, in Scotland. His father, who kept a small shop in that place, and rented a little farm near it, is said to have been a man of acquirements superior to his condition. At his death, the management of his concerns devolved on his widow. David, the eldest of her six children, was of an age to assist his mother. James, the youngest, she placed at the parish school of his native village, which about forty years before had been raised to some celebrity by Ruddiman, the grammarian, and was then kept by one Milne. This man had also a competent skill in grammar. His other deficiencies were supplied by the natural quickness of his pupil, and by the attention of Mr. Thomson, the minister of Laurencekirk, who, being a man of learning, admitted young Beattie to the use of his library, and probably animated him by his encouragement. He very early became sensible to the charms of English verse, to which he was first awakened by the perusal of Ogilby's Virgil. Before he was ten years old, he was as well acquainted with that writer and Homer, as the versions of Pope and Dryden could make him. His schoolfellows distinguished him by the name of the Poet. At the age of fourteen, he was sent to Marischal College, Aberdeen, where he attended the Greek class, taught by Doctor Blackwell, author of the Memoirs of the Court of Augustus, and was by him singled out as the most promising of his scholars. The slender pittance spared him by his mother would scarcely have sufficed for his support, if he had not added to it one of the bursaries or pensions that were bestowed on the most deserving candidates. Of a discourse which he was called on to deliver at the Divinity Hall, it was observed, that he spoke poetry in prose. Thomson was censured for a similar impropriety in one of his : youthful exercises; but Beattie gained the applause of his audience.. His academical education being completed, on the 1st of August, 1753, he was satisfied with the humble appointment of parish-clerk and schoolmaster at the village of Fordoun, about six miles distant from Laurencekirk. Here he attracted the notice of Mr. Garden, at that time sheriff of the county, and afterwards one of the Scotch judges, with the appellation of Lord Gardenstown. In a romantic glen near his house, he chanced to find Beattie with pencil and paper in his hand; and, on questioning him, discovered that he was engaged in the composition of a poem. Mr. Garden desired to see some of his other poems; and doubting whether they were his own productions, requested him to translate the invocation to Venus at the opening of Lucretius, which Beattie did in such a manner as to remove his incredulity. In this retirement, he also became known to Lord Monboddo, whose family seat was in the parish; and a friendly intercourse ensued, which did not terminate till the death of that learned but visionary man. In 1758, he was removed from his employment at Fordoun, to that of Usher in the Grammar School of Aberdeen, for which he had been an unsuccessful competitor in the preceding year, but was now nominated without the form of a trial. At Aberdeen, his heart seems to have taken up its rest; for no temptations could afterwards seduce him for any length of time to quit it. The professorship of Natural Philosophy in the Marischal College, where he had lately been a student, being vacant in 1760, Mr. Arbuthnot, one of his friends, exerted himself with so much zeal in the behalf of Beattie, that he obtained that appointment; although the promotion was such as his most sanguine wishes did not aspire to. Soon after he was further gratified, by being permitted to exchange it for the professorship of Moral Philosophy and Logic, for which he thought himself better fitted. In discharge of the duties belonging to his new function, he immediately entered on a course of lectures, which, as appears from his diary in the possession of Sir William Forbes, he repeated with much diligence for more than thirty years. This occupation could not have been very favourable to his poetical propensity. He had, since his twentieth year, been occasionally a contributor of verse to the Scots Magazine; and in 1760, he published a collection of poems, inscribed to the Earl of Erroll, to whose intervention he had been partly indebted for the office he held in the college. Though the number of these pieces was not considerable, he omitted several of them in subsequent editions, and among others a translation of Virgil's Eclogues, some specimens of which, adduced in a letter written by Lord Woodhouselee, author of the Principles of Translation, will stand a comparison with the parallel passages in Dryden and Warton. In the summer of 1763, his curiosity led him for the first time to London, where Andrew Millar, the bookseller, was almost his only acquaintance. Of this journey no particular is recorded but that he visited Pope's house at Twickenham. In 1765, having sent a letter of compliment to Gray, then on a visit to the Earl of Strathmore, he was invited to Glammis Castle, the residence of that nobleman, to meet the English poet, in whom he found such a combination of excellence as he had hitherto been a stranger to. This appears from a letter written to Sir William Forbes, his faithful friend and biographer, with whom his intimacy commenced about the same time. I am sorry you did not see Mr. Gray on his return; you would have been much pleased with him. Setting aside his merit as a poet, which, however, in my opinion, is greater than any of his contemporaries can boast, in this or in any other nation, I found him possessed of the most exact taste, the soundest judgment, and the most extensive learning. He is happy in a singular facility of expression. His conversation abounds in original observations, delivered with no appearance of sententious formality, and seeming to arise spontane ously without study or premeditation. I passed two very agreeable days with him at Glammis, and found him as easy in his manners, and as communicative and frank, as I could have wished. Gray could not have requited him with such excess of admiration; but continued during the rest of his life to regard Beattie with affection and esteem. It was not till the spring of this year, when his Judgment of Paris was printed, that he again appeared before the public as an author. This piece he inserted in the next edition of his poems in 1766, but his more mature judgment afterwards induced him to reject it. Some satirical verses on the death of Churchill, at first published without his name, underwent the same fate. The Wolf and the Shepherds, a Fable, and an Epistle to the Rev. Mr. Thomas Blacklock, which appeared in the second edition, he also discarded from those subsequently published. He now projected and began the Minstrel, the most popular of his poems. Had the original plan been adhered to, it would have embraced a much wider scope. In 1767, he married Mary, the daughter of Dr. Dun, rector of the Grammar School at Aberdeen. This union was not productive of the happiness which a long course of previous intimacy had entitled him to expect. The object of his choice inherited from her mother a constitutional malady which at first showed itself in capricious waywardness, and at length broke out into insanity. From this misery he sought refuge in the exercise of his mind. His residence at Aberdeen had brought him into the society of several among his countrymen who were engaged in researches well suited to employ his attention to its utmost stretch. Of these, the names of Reid, author of An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Senseand Campbell, Principal of Marischal College, author of An Essay on Miracles, are the most distinguished. His own correspondence with his friends about this time evinces deep concern at the progress of the scepti cal philosophy, diffused by the writings of Hobbes, Hume, Mandeville, and even, in his opinion, of Locke and Berkeley. Conceiving |