satisfaction do we bear testimony to his erudition, his beneficence, and that regard to the interests of his diocese, which will long be remembered and felt in the diocese of St. David's. The records of every English cathedral are not less rich in the names of men, who having ably and well discharged their duties while they lived, have in like manner left their works and their example to posterity-a reflection of which Englishmen might well be proud, if gratitude were not the emotion which we ought to feel toward that Providence under which the Church of England has been cleared of Romish superstitions, and delivered from Romish tyranny; raised from its ruins when it had been overthrown by sectarian madness; and from that time upheld in peace, to the blessing of these kingdoms.

Concerning the alterations in Salisbury Cathedral, which were made when the late excellent Bishop of Durham held that see, and which called forth so much discussion some thirty years ago, Mr. Britton has rather intimated than expressed his opinion. This good has arisen from the injury which was done there, that in subsequent undertakings of the same kind, the architect has come to his work with greater respect for the structures upon which he was employed, and a mind more embued with the principles of Gothic architecture. A beautiful example of this may be seen at Winchester, where every thing that has been done is consonant to the character of the building. Nevertheless it should seem that these national monuments, for such pre-eminently they are, ought, as such, to be under national superintendence. Most of them have funds for keeping them in repair; there is now little danger that these funds should be diverted from their proper purpose, (as they sometimes have been in former times,) nor that, when directed to the use for which they were appropriated, they should be injudiciously and injuriously applied. But these funds do not exist in every instance, nor are they always adequate to the required expenditure; and moreover there are other churches, originally of the same class, which when they lost their rank, were despoiled of their revenues also, and which are now suffering from time so greatly, that if their decay remain much longer unremedied, it must become irremediable. There is Hexham, for example, which for our own honour, as well as in becoming respect to our forefathers, ought to be preserved, while it is yet possible to preserve it. May we not then venture to suggest that these monuments of elder piety and of surpassing art, have a claim upon that national liberality which, not with the assent merely, but with the approbation of all parties in the state, has of late years most worthily been displayed in enriching our national collections with those treasures which it becomes a great

nation to possess? and that government would consult the interest, and deserve the thanks of future ages, by appointing a commission to examine into the state of these national edifices, with the view of taking adequate measures for preserving what no expenditure could possibly replace?

There is one class of men, indeed, by whom any such measures would be opposed; and the temper and the capacity of that class have been admirably illustrated by Berkeley, when he represents himself as walking in St. Paul's, and meditating on the analogy between the building itself and the Christian church in its largest

sense.

The divine order and economy of the one,' he says, seemed to be emblematically set forth by the just, plain, and majestic architecture of the other. And as the one consists of a great variety of parts united in the same regular design, according to the truest art and most exact proportion; so the other contains a decent subordination of members, various sacred institutions, sublime doctrines, and solid precepts of morality digested into the same design, and with an admirable concurrence tending to one view-the happiness and exaltation of human nature. In the midst of my contemplation, I beheld a fly upon one of the pillars; and it straightway came into my head, that the same fly was a free-thinker; for it required some comprehension in the eye of the spectator, to take in at one view the various parts of the building, in order to observe their symmetry and design. But to the fly, whose prospect was confined to a little part of one of the stones of a single pillar, the joint beauty of the whole, or the distinct use of its parts, were inconspicuous; and nothing could appear but small inequalities on the surface of the hewn stone, which in the view of that insect seemed so many deformed rocks and precipices.'

It was said by a man of genius, that Westminster Abbey is part of the constitution. We cannot conclude better than by leaving the reader to reflect upon the serious truth which is conveyed in that lively expression.

ART. II.-Lives of the Novelists. By Sir Walter Scott. 2 vols. 12mo. Paris, Galignani. 1825.

A FEW years ago there appeared at Edinburgh ten volumes in succession of a collection entitled Ballantyne's Novelists' Library, to which Sir Walter Scott supplied prefatory memoirs of the various authors whose works the publication included. The book had the additional recommendations of handsome type and paper, and careful printing-yet it does not seem to have met with success; at least we are at a loss to account otherwise for its sudden suspension, in a state of obvious incompleteness. In the meantime, Mr. Galignani has taken the liberty to detach

Sir

Sir Walter's Memoirs from the bulky tomes in which they lay buried; and we hope our notice of his publication may induce those of whose property he has availed himself to imitate the shrewdness of his example. These essays are among the most agreeable specimens of biographical composition we are acquainted with: they contain a large assemblage of manly and sagacious remarks on human life and manners-and much ingenious criticism besides; and, thus presented in a compact form, must be considered as throwing a new and strong light upon a department of English literature, perhaps the most peculiar, certainly the most popular, and yet, we cannot help thinking, among the least studied of all that we possess.

It is acknowledged on all sides that the novel is the only form of composition to which modern invention can lay any claim; and as it has every appearance of being as natural a form as any that exists, it is no wonder that much speculation should have been expended on the causes of its remaining, to all intents and purposes, untouched by those who carried the drama on the one hand, and history on the other, to their classical perfection. It has been maintained by more than one ingenious writer that, in point of fact, the manners of antiquity did not present a field for this kind of delineation at all comparable to that which social life, as existing in modern times, supplies; that the division of the population into freemen and slaves necessarily abridged, in a miserable manner, the range and extent of social sympathies-and that the all but oriental separation of the sexes in the intercourse of higher life implied an if possible still more unhappy defect of humanizing interest. That these circumstances must have exerted a great and a most unfavourable influence on the whole being and form of ancient society there can be no question: but we must be excused for doubting whether any such influences ever did or could operate to the extent that has been assumed. We have the poets, the historians, the philosophers of antiquity before us; the fragments of its art are still the wonders of the world: and the influence of its intellect is stamped in indelible traces on every European language, and on every system of jurisprudence that has as yet been applied to the regulation of the most ordinary transactions of social life among any civilized people. It would be difficult, we suspect, to find any thorough-bred civilian who would not smile to hear it maintained that a Fielding or a Le Sage could have been at any loss for materials amidst a society so exquisitely refined and complicated as the recorded decisions of the old Roman lawyers imply. But it is not necessary to call in special authority. Artificial institutions, however ill devised, still leave us men and women, parents and children, lovers and friends,

servants

servants and masters, mutually dependent and depending, conscious of the dignity of our nature and the excellence of virtue, subject to the temptations of sense and the tyranny of passion. In every age, at all events among every civilized people, the great elements of social interest must have been the same. A man was not the less your valet because he happened to be born your verna. You might make what regulations you pleased as to the order of processions, and the benches of theatres; but what lawgiver ever hit upon a plan that could assure domestic tranquillity to the husband of a Xantippe, or prevent an Arria from dying with her Pætus? It appears to us, in truth, to be somewhat strange to talk about slavery as blotting three parts of a population out of the map of manners, when we know that that condition of human life was capable of embracing at once a Dromio and the Terence who drew him; and, much as modern woman owes to Gothic chivalry and the religion of the Bible, we must still ask what charm of female character remained entirely destitute of homage among nations that appreciated the amatory delicacy of the Anthologies, the filial piety of an Antigone, the conjugal devotion of an Alcestis, the majestic sorrows of an Andromache? It is much to be regretted that we have no ancient novels :—but surely it is a strange vanity which leads us to decide that the materials for any form of imaginative composition could have been a-wanting among communities who were unquestionably familiar with the highest displays of human intellect in every walk of art and science, and with the exhibition of human character under every light and shade which could result from the conflicting influence of principle and passion on every possible variety of temperament and constitution.

Who, to take an example, can read Horace, and doubt that Horace might have written a novel? It can scarcely be doubted that Quintus Horatius Flaccus had uncles and aunts and cousins enough among the slaves, from which class of the population his family had so recently emerged. He rose by his own talents to the very highest society-he had seen mankind and womankind in every degree-in the cottage and the palace, and in every intervening order of human habitation. He had enjoyed the humours of inns, and, whether he enjoyed them or not, he had witnessed all the incidents of a campaign, at least as varied, and as interesting, we should fancy, as that which terminated in Culloden :—he was the companion of statesmen whose characters and manners may have been as picturesque, we suppose, as those of Olivarez or Lerma, or Buckingham or Chatham: nor can we be persuaded that the intrigues of the Ovids and the Julias had nothing entertaining in them, or that the author of Peregrine Pickle

could

could have supped with Novidienus, and found no use for his tables. The scattered members of the novelist are found everywhere among the writers of antiquity; and the Journey to Brundusium in esse, is proof enough that the expedition of a Roman Humphry Clinker might have been. Why might not the Sabine farm-house have been described as minutely as Pliny's grand villa, and yet as lightly as the pavilions of Lirias? or why should the complete and satisfactory, though untechnical description of such a scene of retirement have been devoid of luxury to the reader, who had, after a couple of volumes of the Suburra and the Via Sacra, been compelled to feel as if he had, in good earnest,

If we look for excitements of a darker kind, we cannot see why the Jews and Chaldeans of the Roman suburbs might not have been made as imposing as any Gipsies of our acquaintance; or why Canidia herself might not have presented as picturesque a full-length as Meg Merrilies. As for robbers and murderers and their caves, both Le Sage and Smollett have, as it is, taken their best pieces of that sort from Lucian; and indeed both this last writer, and the author, whoever he was, that passes under the name of Petronius, have in many places approached so closely the strain and tone of the most popular modern novelists, that we wonder at, scarcely less than we regret, the fact of their having missed the full career of a path which was so near them, and which, if they had once hit on it, must have been found so admirably adapted for the display of their peculiar talents.

It is a very common trait of human vanity to argue that because a thing was not, it could not have been. At what period are we to fix the commencement of the novel in posse? What mere theory can account for our having no English novel of the æra of the Canterbury Tales? Why should it have been impossible for a contemporary of Froissart to compose an admirable novel? Why should the country of Shakspeare have been without such a work, while he and Cervantes died on the same day? Was it impossible to introduce Mrs. Quickly in the same form of composition with Mrs. Towouse? Might not Justice Shallow's great chamber have been the scene of as many adventures as Squire Western's hall?-Might not Sir Hugh Evans or Holofernes have figured through books and chapters as nobly as Mr. Abraham Adams or Mr. Thwackum? Would Beatrice have been an insipid heroine in comparison with Sophia Western? Or must Autolycus have lost all his humour by figuring under a plain English name and surname at some Warwickshire wake? We beg leave, in public-dinner phrase,' to deprecate the idea.'

We