put to our miserable being, and we shall be mingled with the dirt under our feet, a thing common to all the animal kind; and of which he who complains does not seem to have been set by his reason so far above them in life, as to deserve not to be mingled with them in death. Such is the consolation his philosophy gives us, and such is the hope on which his tranquillity was founded.” (Memoir in Mathias's Edition.-Life by Mitford.-Johnson's Lives of the Poets.) BROOME AND WEST. THERE are two Etonians of the first half of this century, whom Johnson has ranked among the English poets: and, in deference to so high an authority, I have abridged and inserted his memoirs of their Lives. But I have searched in vain for any favourable specimen of their poetry which I might transfer to these pages. These two are BROOME and WEST: not Gray's friend, Richard West, but Gilbert West, a friend of Lord Lyttelton. Johnson says of the first," William Broome was born in Cheshire, as is said, of very mean parents. Of the place of his birth, or the first part of his life, I have not been able to gain any intelligence. He was educated upon the foundation at Eton, and was Captain of the school a whole year, without any vacancy by which he might obtain a scholarship at King's College. Being by this delay, such as is said to have happened very rarely, superannuated, he was sent to St. John's College by the contributions of his friends, where he obtained a small exhibition." Johnson must be inaccurate as to Broome being Captain of a year in which no vacancy at King's occurred. No year wholly blank of resignations is recorded in the Registrum Regale from 1653 to 1756. Broome must have been at Eton soon after 1700. suppose the fact to have been, that Broome's seniors in his year went off to King's soon after Election, and that Broome remained Captain till the next election, without another resignation coming. Johnson proceeds to speak of Broome's career at Cambridge, and says, "He was introduced to Mr. Pope, who was then visiting Sir John Cotton at Madingley, near Cambridge, and gained so much by his esteem, that he was employed, I believe, to make 7 Mathias's Works of Gray, vol. i. pp. 370-374. extracts from Eustathius for the notes to the translation of the 'Iliad ;' and in the volumes of poetry published by Lintot, commonly called 'Pope's Miscellanies,' many of his early pieces were inserted. Pope and Broome were to be more closely connected. When the success of the Iliad' gave encouragement to a version of the Odyssey,' Pope, weary of the toil, called Fenton and Broome to his assistance, and, taking only half the work upon himself, divided the other half between his partners, giving four books to Fenton and eight to Broome. Fenton's books I have enumerated in his life; to the lot of Broome fell the second, sixth, eighth, eleventh, twelfth, sixteenth, eighteenth, and twenty-third, together with the burden of writing all the notes. As this translation is a very important event in poetical history, the reader has a right to know upon what grounds I establish my narration. That the version was not wholly Pope's was always known; he had mentioned the assistance of two friends in his proposals, and at the end of the work some account is given by Broome of their different parts, which, however, mentions only five books as written by the coadjutors; the fourth and twentieth by Fenton; the sixth, the eleventh, and eighteenth by himself; though Pope, in an advertisement prefixed afterwards to a new volume of his works, claimed only twelve. A natural curiosity, after the real conduct of so great an undertaking, incited me once to inquire of Dr. Warburton, who told me, in his warm language, that he thought the relation given in the note a 'lie;' but that he was not able to ascertain the several shares. The intelligence which Dr. Warburton could not afford me I obtained from Mr. Langton, to whom Mr. Spence had imparted it. "Broome probably considered himself as injured, and there was for some time more than coldness between him and his employer. He always spoke of Pope as too much a lover of money, and Pope pursued him with avowed hostility; for he not only named him disrespectfully in the Dunciad,' but quoted him more than once in the 'Bathos,' as a proficient in the Art of Sinking;' and in his enumeration of the different kinds of poets distinguished for the profound, he reckons Broome among the parrots who repeat another's words in such a hoarse odd tone as makes them seem their own.' I have been told that they were afterwards reconciled; but I am afraid their peace was without friendship. He was "He never rose to very high dignity in the Church. sometime rector of Sturton in Suffolk, where he married a rich widow, and afterwards, when the King visited Cambridge (1728), became Doctor of Laws. He was (1733) presented by the Crown to the rectory of Pulham in Norfolk, which he held with Oakley Magna in Suffolk, given him by the Lord Cornwallis, to whom he was chaplain, and who added the vicarage of Eye in Suffolk; he then resigned Pulham, and retained the two other. "Of Broome, though it cannot be said that he was a great poet, it would be unjust to deny that he was an excellent versifier; his lines are smooth and sonorous, and his diction is select and elegant. His rhymes are sometimes unsuitable; in his 'Melancholy,' he makes breath rhyme to birth in one place, and to earth in another. Those faults occur but seldom; and he had such power of words and numbers as fitted him for translation; but, in his original works, recollection seems to have been his business more than invention. His imitations are so apparent, that it is part of his reader's employment to recal the verses of some former poet. To detect his imitations were tedious and useless. What he takes he seldom makes worse; whom Pope chose for an associate, and whose co-operation was considered by Pope's enemies as so important, that he was attacked by Henly with this ludicrous distich : 'Pope came off clean with Homer; but they say I next subjoin an epitome of Johnson's account of Gilbert West. It is curious to see Johnson so complaisant to these rather dingy cygnets after his treatment of such a swan as Gray : "West was the son of the Reverend Dr. West, perhaps him who published 'Pindar' at Oxford, about the beginning of this century. His mother was sister to Sir Richard Temple, afterwards Lord Cobham. His father, purposing to educate him for the Church, sent him first to Eton, and afterwards to Oxford; but he was seduced to a more airy mode of life, by a commission in a troop of horse procured him by his uncle. He continued sometime in the army, though it is reasonable to suppose he never sunk into a mere soldier, nor ever lost the love or much neglected the pursuit of learning; and afterwards, finding himself more inclined to civil employment, he laid down his commission, and engaged in business under the Lord Townshend, then Secretary of State, with whom he attended the King to Hanover. Soon afterwards he married, and settled himself in a very pleasant house at Wickham in Kent, where he devoted himself to learning and to piety. Of his piety the influence has, I hope, been extended far by his Observations on the Resurrection,' published in 1747, for which the University of Oxford created him a Doctor of Laws by diploma (March 30, 1748), and would doubtless have reached yet further, had he lived to complete what he had for some time meditated, the Evidences of the Truth of the New Testament. Perhaps it may not be without effect to tell, that he read the prayers of the public liturgy every morning to his family, and that on Sunday evening he called his servants into the parlour, and read to them first a sermon, and then prayers. Crashaw is now not the only maker of verses to whom may be given the two venerable names of Poet and Saint. He was very often visited by Lyttelton and Pitt, who, when they were weary of faction and debates, used at Wickham to find books and quiet, a decent table, and literary conversation. There is at Wickham a walk made by Pitt; and, what is of far more importance, at Wickham Lyttelton received that conviction which produced his Dissertation on St. Paul.' These two illustrious friends had for a while listened to the blandishments of infidelity; and when West's book was published, it was bought by some who did not know his change of opinion, in expectation of new objections against Christianity; and as infidels do not want malignity they revenged the disappointment by calling him a Methodist. "Mr. West's income was not large; and his friends endeavoured, but without success, to obtain an augmentation. It is reported that the education of the young prince was offered to him, but he required a more extensive power of superintendence than it was thought proper to allow him. In time, however, his revenue was improved; he lived to have one of the lucrative clerkships of the Privy Council (1752), and Mr. Pitt at last had it in his power to make him Treasurer of Chelsea Hospital. "He was now sufficiently rich, but wealth came too late to be long enjoyed; nor could it secure him from the calamities of life; he lost (1755) his only son; and the year after (March 26) a stroke of the palsy brought to the grave one of the few poets to whom the grave might be without its terrors." DR. ARNE. As Music is by common reputation the lawful wife of Poetry, 1 shall place next to these Etonian poets an Etonian musician, Dr. Arne. I must, however, own my utter inability to discuss the merits of the combiners of sweet sounds, and the following sketch is epitomised from the account of this eminent composer in the Biographical Dictionary of the Useful Knowledge Society: "Thomas Augustine Arne was the son of an upholsterer in King Street, Covent Garden, London. His father, designing him for the legal profession, sent him to school at Eton, where his musical propensities first disclosed themselves. The study of the law was afterwards reluctantly, and therefore unsuccessfully, pursued; every hour that could be stolen from the desk, and many from sleep, were devoted to musical study and practice. He secreted a spinnet in his bed-room, and there acquired his first knowledge of a keyed instrument, which fear of his father's displeasure obliged him to practise with muffled strings. He continued to take lessons of Festing on the violin; and his father, accidentally calling at the house of a friend, caught young Arne in the fact of leading a party of amateur performers. Anger and remonstrance were alike vain, and he was at length allowed to follow the path which inclination so clearly pointed out. His sister possessed a similar degree of musical enthusiasm, and, gifted with a remarkably sweet voice, she willingly derived from him sufficient instruction to qualify her for a public singer. The English lyric drama at this period had reached its lowest point of declination. It was under circumstances unpropitious, and with means slender, that young Arne attempted to revive the long-dormant taste of his countrymen for their national music. His first attempt was to reset Addison's 'Rosamond,' which was brought out in 1733 at the theatre in Lincoln'sInn-Fields. "The first opera which raised Arne to general popularity was 'Comus.' The bold attempt to adapt Milton's exquisite Masque to the stage was made by Dr. Dalton, who produced it at Drury Lane in 1738. Arne had little to do with the text of Milton, for the songs on which he was employed are chiefly additions by the |