Colman.

GEORGE COLMAN, 1733–1794, was an eminent dramatist and theatrical manager, of the last century.

Colman was born at Florence, where his father at that time was British Minister. He was entered at Westminster School, where he gave signs of talent. From Westminster he went to Oxford, and thence to Lincoln's Inn to study law. But the bent of his mind was in another direction, and the law gave way to letters and the stage. He entered fully upon a theatrical career about the age of twenty-seven, and he continued it to the end. He wrote a large number of plays for the stage; he had a share in the proprietorship of Covent Garden; and he undertook the management of the Haymarket. In 1789, at the age of fifty-six, he lost his reason, and he died about five years afterwards.

Colman's dramatic works fill 4 vols., 8vo. The names of some of the most successful plays are Polly Honeycomb, The Jealous Wife, etc. Ile translated the Comedies of Terence into English blank verse. He also translated Horace's Art of Poetry. Both these works show taste and scholarship. He contributed humorous papers to several periodicals. His miscellaneous writings fill 3 vols.

RICHARD GLOVER, 1712-1785, was a London merchant, who, without the advantages of a University education, attained such proficiency in learning as to be styled by Warton "one of the best Greek scholars of his time." He was also famous in his day as a poet, and attained eminence as a politician, being several times elected to Parliament. It is not improbable that his Parliamentary influence had something to do with the extravagant applause given to him for his scholarship and his poetry, Fielding, Lyttleton, and others, who swelled the chorus, being of the same political party with him.

Works.-Glover's principal publications are the following: Leonidas, a Poem, 4to, celebrating the defence of Thermopyla; The Atheniad, a Poem, a continuation of the Leonidas; London, or the Progress of Commerce, a Poem, 4to; Hosier's Ghost, a Ballad, written to excite the English against the Spaniards, and very sensational in character; Boadicea, a Tragedy, performed for nine nights; Medea, a Tragedy, “written on the Greek model, and therefore unfit for the modern stage; " Jason, a Tragedy, "requiring scenery of the most expensive kind, and never exhibited."

"His Leonidas acquired extraordinary popularity in its day, and appears, like the pseudo-Ossian, to have obtained a higher, or, at least, a more lasting reputation on the continent than in its own country. The Atheniad was intended as a sequel to Leonidas, and embraces the remainder of the Persian war, from the death of Leonidas to the battle of Platea. It was the work of the author's old age, and its defects are, in part, attributable to the circumstance of its not having received his finishing hand. In this latter performance, accordingly, the abilities of the author show themselves more matured, and his peculiar properties more fully developed.” — Retrospective Review.

JOHN HOME, 1724–1808, acquired general celebrity by his play of Douglas.

Home was a native of Ancrum, Scotland. He was educated at the University of Edinburgh, and licensed to preach in the Church of Scotland. In 1757, he was obliged to withdraw from the ministry to avoid degradation, in consequence of having published, and had performed, his play of Douglas. His patron, Lord Bute, procured for him a pension and a sinecure office under the Government. Home served as a volunteer against the Pretender in 1745. He was the author of several plays, none of which, except The Douglas, met with any success. This last, a tragedy, was greeted with enthusiasm on the occasion of its first rendering, and has maintained its position ever since. Several of its scenes are unsurpassed for effectiveness upon the stage. Besides his dramatic pieces, Home published, in 1802, A History of the Rebellion of 1745, which has its merits of style, but can scarcely be called a trustworthy historical work, and has been severely criticized even by some of Home's warmest admirers.

ISAAC BICKERSTAFF, 1735-1787, an Irish dramatic writer, produced a large number of plays. More than twenty are named. Three comic pieces, Love in a Village, The Maid of the Mill, and Lionel and Clarissa, were particularly successful.

REV. SAMUEL BISHOP, 1731-1795, a clergyman, schoolmaster, and poet, published several poetical works, but is chiefly known as the author of the farce of High Life below Stairs, often attributed to Garrick.

III. MISCELLANEOUS PROSE WRITERS.

Hannah More.

Hannah More, 1745-1833, was a "bright particular star in the firmament of letters all through three of the periods marked in the present treatise, those, namely, of Johnson, Cowper, and Walter Scott. But she culminated during the last ten years of the eighteenth century, and to that period accordingly she has been assigned.

Though never married, she acquired by courtesy, in her later years, the title of Mrs. Hannah More, according to a beautiful usage not then extinct in England. She wrote much both in verse and prose, but distinguished herself chiefly in the latter.

Of all writers of her day, of either sex, none exerted by their writings a purer influence; and she is entitled to lasting remembrance for the services which she rendered in improving and elevating the standard of private morals. She was pre-eminently the moralist of her generation.

Hannah More's earliest productions were dramatic. Among them are The Search after Happiness, The Inflexible Captive, Percy, and

The Fatal Falsehood. She then abandoned writing for the stage, as inconsistent with her Christian character, but, like Racine, produced some sacred dramas, as Belshazzar, Daniel, and numerous poems. She is best known by her Moral Tales and her Contributions to the Cheap Repository Tracts. Among the latter is the famous Shepherd of Salisbury Plain. Among the former is Cœlebs in Search of a Wife. She also wrote several essays, the principal of which are Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, and Hints towards forming the Character of a Young Princess (for Charlotte, Princess of Wales).

"It would be idle in us to dwell here on works so well known as the Thoughts on the Manners of the Great, the Essay on the Religion of the Fashionable World, and so on, which finally established Miss More's name as a great moral writer, possessing a masterly command over the resources of our language, and devoting a keen wit and a lively fancy to the best and noblest of purposes. ... She did, perhaps, as much real good in her generation as any woman that ever held the pen." - London Quarterly.

Mrs. Piozzi.

MRS. HESTER LYNCH PIOZZI, 1740-1821, is known by her poem The Three Warnings, and by her Recollections of Dr. Johnson.

Mrs. Piozzi was a native of Wales. Her maiden name was Salisbury; she married Henry Thrale, and, afterwards, in 1781, Gabriel Piozzi, an Italian. During the lifetime of her first husband, Dr. Johnson was an intimate friend of the family. Mrs. Piozzi published a number of fugitive poems, the best known of which is The Three Warnings, and a few miscellaneous works. She is principally known, however, by her Recollections of Dr. Johnson, published in 1796, and her Letters to and from Dr. Johnson. Her Recollections are pretentious and trifling, but narrate many incidents of interest in the great lexicographer's life.

Madame D'Arblay.

MADAME FRANCES D'ARBLAY, 1752-1840, daughter and biographer of the great historian of music, Dr. Burney, lived to the extreme age of eighty-eight, which brings her in one sense within the present generation. But her main activity was in the eighteenth century, and she belongs really to the times of Johnson, Burke, Cowper, and Hannah More.

Fanny was a shy, sensitive child, and at the age of eight did not know her letters. Her mother dying when Fanny was ten, and her father from over-indulgence not putting her under the control of a tutor, she grew up into womanhood pretty much "according to her own sweet will." The musical reputation of Dr. Burney made his house the resort of all the great men of letters, Johnson, Burke, Garrick, and others, and it was the brilliant conversation of these men that first gave a stimulus to the thoughts of the reserved, but all-observing girl.

Evelina, her first work, was written, according to her own account, when she was about seventeen or eighteen. She kept the composition of it entirely to herself for several years, and then sent it anonymously to Dodsley. As he refused to publish it on those conditions, she finally sold him the manuscript for £20. It was at once extremely popular, and gained the applause of the highest critics then known to the nation. "She found herself on the highest pinnacle of fame."- Macaulay. Cecilia, which followed almost four years later, did not disappoint the high expectations raised by the first. "It was placed, by general acclamation, among the classical works of England." - Macaulay.

Miss Burney had the ill-fortune, soon after, to be appointed, at her father's request, to the post of the Keeper of Robes to Queen Charlotte. The life to which she was here subjected, was one peculiarly unsuited to her sensitive nature; and though treated with gentle kindness by her royal patrons, she felt the position to be an intolerable bondage. She was married in 1793 to a French officer, Count D'Arblay, and in 1802 she accompanied him to Paris, where she remained until his death, în 1812. Her remaining years were spent in England.

Besides the works already mentioned, she published Edwin and Elgitha, a Tragedy; Camilla, which brought her three thousand guineas; and The Wanderer, a Tale, which brought £1500. She wrote also a Memoir of her father, Dr. Burney, in 3 vols. The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay were published after her death, in 7 vols., 8vo, and created considerable sensation on account of the eminent character of the persons among whom she had moved, and the unreserved nature of her observations.

"Miss Burney did for the English novel what Jeremy Collier did for the English drama. She first showed that a tale might be written in which both the fashionable and the vulgar life of London might be exhibited with great force, and with broad comic humor, and which yet should not contain a single line inconsistent with rigid morality, or even with virgin delicacy. She took away the reproach which lay on a most useful and delightful species of composition. She vindicated the right of her sex to have an equal share in a fair and noble promise of letters. Burke had sat up all night to read her writings, and Johnson had pronounced her superior to Fielding, when Rogers was still a school-boy, and Southey still in petticoats."— Macaulay.

Macaulay's judgment is not always equal to his rhetoric. The following estimate probably comes nearer to the truth:

"Her works are deficient in original vigor of conception, and her characters in depth and nature. She has considered so anxiously the figured silks and tamboured muslins which flutter about society, that she has made the throbbings of the heart which they cover a secondary consideration. Fashion passes away, and the manners of the great are unstable, but natural emotion belongs to immortality."— Allan Cunningham.

CHARLES BURNEY, 1726-1814, father of Fanny Burney, already noticed, published in 1773 a History of Music, which is still a standard on the subject of which it treats.

Burney's work was A General History of Music, from the earliest periods down to the time of writing. Dr. Barney (he received from Oxford the unusual degree of Doctor of Music) was eminent as a musician and a writer of music; but gained his chief distinction by becoming the historian of the science. He wrote other things, but this was the chief. Dr. Burney gave dignity to the character of the modern musician, by joining to it that of the scholar and philosopher."— Sir William Jones.

JAMES BURNEY, 1739-1821, Rear-Admiral of the British Navy, and son of Dr-Burney the historian of music, compiled A Chronological History of the Discoveries in the South Seas, or Pacific Ocean, with a History of the Buccaneers of America, 5 vols., 4to; A Chronological History of North-Eastern Voyages of Discovery; and other works.

Mrs. Radcliffe.

MRS. ANNA RADCLIFFE, 1764–1823, attained great temporary distinction as a novelist. One of her novels, The Mysteries of Udolpho, is unparalleled in its kind in English literature.

Mrs. Radcliffe travelled a little on the continent, but otherwise seems to have passed her time in country retirement. Even after she had become famous as a novelist, she did not suffer herself to be attracted by the society of London.

Few writers afford a more signal instance of the untrustworthiness of the adage, vox populi vox Dei. About the beginning of this century Mrs. Radcliffe was one of the bright stars of the literary firmament, admired not merely by the vulgar worshippers of the novel, but by men of unquestioned genius. Sir Walter Scott, Talfourd, Dr. Warren, Byron, were among her enthusiastic readers. Yet so completely has the popular fancy changed, and the love of the unnatural and horrible been replaced by a taste for what is healthier, at least more life-like, that Mrs. Radcliffe is scarcely known to the public except by name, and scarcely read except by the professional student of literature. Her truly great contemporaries have waxed more and more in brightness, while she herself has waned into the obscurity of the upper shelves of the circulating library.

Mrs. Radcliffe's first work, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbane, 1789, was not successful. It was followed by A Sicilian Romance, and The Romance of the Forest, which established her fame. Her greatest work, however, and that by which she is almost exclusively known, is The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794. Her next novel was The Italian, a story of the confessional. Gaston de Blondeville, and one or two other pieces, were published posthumously, in 1826, by Talfourd. Her poems also were collected and published at the same time.

"Her descriptions of scenery are vague and wordy to the last degree; they are neither like Salvator nor Claude, nor nature nor art; her characters are insipid,- the shadows of a shade, continued on, under different names, through all her novels; her story comes to nothing. But in harrowing up the soul with imaginary horrors, and making the flesh creep and the nerves thrill with fond hopes and fears, she is unrivalled among her fair country women. Her great power lies in describing the indefinable, and embodying a phantom. . . . She has all the poetry of Romance, all that is obscure, visionary, and objectless in the imagination." - Hazlitt.

MRS. CHARLOTTE LENNOX, 1720-1804, was a native of New York, daughter of Col. James Ramsay, Lieutenant-Governor of that city. She was sent to London for her education, and remained there, maintaining herself by the use of her pen. She was on friendly terms with the novelist Richardson, with Dr. Johnson, and other celebrities. Dr. Johnson ranked her with Hannah More and Fanny Burney, which was evidently an overestimate.