* *

"And turn'd and look'd, and turn'd to look again."

As a novelist, his Vicar of Wakefield has charmed all Europe. What
reader is there in the civilised world, who is not the better for the
story of the washes which the worthy Dr. Primrose demolished so
deliberately with the poker--for the knowledge of the guinea which the
Miss Primroses kept unchanged in their pockets--the adventure of the
picture of the Vicar's family, which could not be got into the house--
and that of the Flamborough family, all painted with oranges in their
hands--or for the story of the case of shagreen spectacles and the
cosmogony?

As a comic writer, his Tony Lumpkin draws forth new powers from Mr.
Liston's face. That alone is praise enough for it. Poor Goldsmith! how
happy he has made others! how unhappy he was in himself! He never had
the pleasure of reading his own works! He had only the satisfaction of
good-naturedly relieving the necessities of others, and the consolation
of being harassed to death with his own! He is the most amusing and
interesting person, in one of the most amusing and interesting books in
the world, Boswell's Life of Johnson. His peach-coloured coat shall
always bloom in Boswell's writings, and his fame survive in his own!--
His genius was a mixture of originality and imitation: he could do
nothing without some model before him, and he could copy nothing that he
did not adorn with the graces of his own mind. Almost all the latter
part of the Vicar of Wakefield, and a great deal of the former, is taken
from Joseph Andrews; but the circumstances I have mentioned above are
not.

The finest things he has left behind him in verse are his character
of a country school-master, and that prophetic description of Burke in
the Retaliation. His moral Essays in the Citizen of the World, are as
agreeable chit-chat as can be conveyed in the form of didactic
discourses.

Warton was a poet and a scholar, studious with ease, learned without
affectation. He had a happiness which some have been prouder of than he,
who deserved it less--he was poet-laureat.

"And that green wreath which decks the bard when dead,
That laurel garland crown'd his living head."

But he bore his honours meekly, and performed his half-yearly task
regularly. I should not have mentioned him for this distinction alone
(the highest which a poet can receive from the state), but for another
circumstance; I mean his being the a