XIII.

RELIGIOUS BIOGRAPHY.

We believe Dr. Johnson was the first critic to complain of the penury of English biography. It was a complaint that savored more of hastiness and ignorance than the Doctor's contemporary admirers would have been willing to allow any reviewer to discover in him, but still it was such; and now that every pretender to criticism makes it a point to beard the rough but manly old dogmatist, we may allow ourselves the privilege of picking an additional flaw in his critical reputation (almost worn out by repeated attacks). It is certain, for his undoubted vigor and ability, no writer of eminence ever made so many and such gross critical blunders as Doctor Johnson. On real life and domestic morals; the character and manners of the Londoners; the hypocrisies of men of the world; the thin-skinned sentimentalities of pretenders to sentiment and criticism, he exhibited an acuteness of observation, a comprehensivness of judgment, and pungency of satire, that have never been surpassed. But in the field of literary criticism, requiring finer tact and a nicer perception, the grossness of his senses, no less than the obtuseness of his taste, rendered him unfit, physically and intellectually, to judge of poets and men of fancy.

In the rich territory of old English literature, there is not, perhaps, a more fruitful province than that of biography, not only in the classic form of lives, but also memoirs, diaries and autobiography. It is true the lives most generally read at present, were written either during the lifetime or since the death of Johnson; as in the former period the classic lives of Goldsmith and Johnson, and the memoirs of Cumberland, and from that period to the present day, among heaps of wretched compilations, we must distinguish the first book of the kind in the world, Boswell's Johnson, the learned autobiography of Gibbon, the simple yet fascinating lives of Hume and Franklin, honest selfpainters; the classic compendiums of Southey, the lives of Burns by Currie and Lockhart, and the minor sketches of Irving. The latest permanent work of this class, is the Memoirs of Leigh Hunt. And yet by far the richest treasures of English biography are to be found among the antiquarian volumes of the old English library. The best

of these form a choice list; classic to this day. There are the lives, by Burnet, of Hale and Rochester; the austere, incorruptible judge and pure citizen, and the lively, volatile wit and libertine subsiding into a sober, earnest Christian. Walton's lives are too well known to dilate upon the heroes of them at present, yet what a noble company of poets, divines and Christian gentlemen form the subjects of his volumes; Hooker, and Wotton, and Donne, and Herbert, and Sanderson. Zouch's life of Walton himself is fit to be included as the humble companion of these. Then we have North's life of Lord Guilford, full of lively personal strokes and characters of the great lawyers of the time of Charles II. and James II. Fenton's lives of Milton and Waller-Fell's Hammond, the Fene

lon of the royalist divines, and favorite chaplain of Charles I., sharing his imprisonment and dangers. Among the latest of the older lives, Doddridge's Life of Colonel Gardiner, of which we shall say more before we conclude.

The French have the reputation of being the best memoir writers in the world, yet their most courtly wits have not surpassed Grammont (himself a Frenchman), in his pictures of the royal licentiousness of the age of Charles II., and, on the spot, Pepys and Evelyn. The memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson by his wife, and of Venetia Digby, the beauty of her day, and the popular toast, despite her doubtful reputation, by the quaint fantast Sir Kenelm Digby, are at least a fair match for Bassompiere and Rochefoucauld. And then, as repositories of facts and personal circumstances nowhere else to be learned, we have the elaborate histories of Wood and Fuller, Spence's and Aubrey's anecdotes, and the letter writers, from old Howell himself to Pope and his friends. If such a list looks like penury," we should like to learn the comparative scale by which "wealth" is to be adjudged.

A fair proportion of the old lives are those of good Christians without pretence, and fine scholars without presumption. Most of them, too, have an additional value as models for conduct: Rochester and Gardiner being the sole instances of "men that need repentance," and they both converted in the heyday of the vicious career in which they were embarked.

So much by way of preface-a long introduction to a brief article. We have selected this topic to point out the prevalent defects, in almost every work of the kind; defects, too, springing from the best of motives, and more easily discovered than corrected. In the best of the old

lives we find this ever-recurring defect: a desire to paint in the hero of biography, a perfect man; a tendency to exaggerate individual and particular merits, by the force of contrast with inferior traits in much inferior characters. The writers of lives, in all times, have been too sparing of the shade in their portraits. A profusion of light falling upon the admirable virtues, allows no room for the exhibition of defects. Every trait is heightened; every characteristic marked with an emphasis, seldom found in nature. The subjects of biography, like the heroes of novels, are too often,

"Faultless monsters whom the world ne'er saw."

This disgusts the thoughtful reader, whether young or old; for the youthful student soon finds these pictures disproved in real life, and the sage knows their unreality while he is perusing the page. In the older lives, in all of those to which we have referred, a saving clause may be inserted, that the subjects of the writers were all of them men of that eminence that either extravagant praise or excessive censure soon corrected itself. For one would report differently of their lives and actions from another, and hence a balance might easily be struck between them. And besides, in extenuation, we may offer the best apology for the biographer, that his hero was often a character so fascinating, viewed as a whole, that it was very excusable to overlook minor errors and petty defects. All of Walton's characters, for instance, inevitably seduce a writer into encomium, when he should be writing impartially; and it is pleasanter, as well as easier, to pen an eulogy rather than a life. This was the fault that Johnson ac

cuses Sprat of falling into,* and a fault more glaring in Mrs. Hutchinson's book than in most of the old lives, and less justifiable, since she wrote the history of her time, as well as the life of her husband.

Doddridge's Life of Colonel Gardiner is a singular specimen of this class of books, of an inferior literary value, compared with the rest, but still excellent.

As an exam

ple of its class, we will give the reader a summary digest of its contents. The author, a nonconformist divine of considerable reputation, became in the career of his ministry professionally acquainted and intimately connected with the subject of his narrative, who was a royalist officer, a colonel of dragoons. Gardiner revealed to him from time to time the most eventful passages of his life, over which hung, in his devout imagination, a mystical halo, radiant with celestial beauty. He was born at a remarkable period, 1688, the year of the English Revolution, and expired, at a no less stirring time, on the battle field at Preston Pans, when the partisans of the house of Stuart were out" for the second time, in '45.

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This distinguished officer and Christian was the son of an officer of good family, who fought the battles of his country on the continent, during the reign of William III., and of Anne, after him, and in which Marlborough was the presiding military genius of Great Britain. A military school, with Marlborough and Eugene at its head, could not fail of turning out able commanders; and of these Gardiner was one of the chief. Brave, to a daring rashness, he had all the splendid qualities, and but too many of the striking vices, of the soldier. Like the ma

*Life of Cowley.