The following are Mrs. Lennox's principal productions: The Female Quixote, 2 vols. ; Henrietta, a Novel, 2 vols.; Sophia, a Novel, 2 vols.; Euphemia, a Novel, 4 vols.; Memoir of Harriet Stuart; Memoir of Henry Lennox; Shakespeare Illustrated, 3 vols.; Philander, a Dramatic Pastoral; The Sisters, a Comedy; Old City Manners, a Comedy; Poems. She translated also from the French, Father Brumoy's Greek Theatre, 3 vols., 4to; The Duke of Sully's Memoirs, 3 vols., 4to; and the Memoirs of Madame Maintenon, and of the Countess of Berci, etc.

ELIZABETH HAMILTON, 1758-1816, was a writer of great celebrity about the beginning of the present century. Sir Walter Scott was a particular admirer of her writings.

The principal works of Mrs. Hamilton are the following: Letters of a Hindoo Rajah; Memoirs of Modern Philosophers; Letters on Education; Letters on the Moral and Religious Principle; The Cottagers of Glenburnie. The last named is considered her best.

"We have not met with anything nearly so good as this, since we read Castle Rackrent and the Popular Tales of Miss Edgeworth. This contains as admirable a picture of the Scottish peasantry as do those of the Irish; and rivals them not only in the general truth of the delineations, and in the cheerfulness and practical good sense of the lessons they convey, but in the nice discrimination of national character, and the skill with which a dramatic representation of humble life is saved from caricature and absurdity."- Sir Walter Scott.

MRS. CHARLOTTE SMITH, 1749-1806, wrote a large number of works, of which the one now best known is The Old Manor House.

She was married at the early age of fifteen to Mr. Benjamin Smith, a merchant engaged in the West India trade. The improvident speculations and extravagance of Mr. Smith threw upon Mrs. Smith the support of herself and her children, twelve in number, and this she undertook, as many other mothers have done, by the use of her pen. Mrs. Smith, her writings and her fortunes, figure in Walter Scott's Lives of the Novelists, Leigh Hunt's Men, Women, and Books, Julia Kavanagh's English Women of Letters, and many other works of a like kind.

Mrs. Smith wrote the following works: Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle, Ethelinda, the Ruler of the Lake, Celestina, Desmond, Montalbert, Marchmant, The Young Philosopher, The Banished Man, and The Old Manor House. The last named is considered her best.

She published several volumes of poetry: Elegiac Sonnets and other Essays; The Emigrants; and Beachy Head, etc. Other works of hers are Romance and Real Life, a collection of interesting and well authenticated facts; Rural Works; Minor Morals, with Sketches of Natural History; Conversations on Natural History; Natural History of Birds, etc.

LADY ELEANOR FENN, 1744-1813, wrote numerous educational works, under the assumed name of Mrs. Lovechild: The Child's Grammar; The Mother's Grammar; Parsing Lessons for Elder Pupils; Grammatical Amusements; Sunday Miscellany; Short Sermons for Young Persons, etc.

SIR JOHN FENN, 1739-1794, an antiquary, made a collection of original Letters, written by members of the Paston family, during the reigns of Henry VI., Edward IV.,

Richard III., and Henry VII. These Paston Letters fill 5 vols., 4to, and are considered of great value in elucidating the manners of the people during a most interesting period of history. "I am now reading the Paston Letters, written in the wars of York and Lancaster, and am greatly entertained with them. Their antique air, their unstudied communication of the modes of those old times, with their undoubted authenticity, render them highly interesting, curious, and informing.". Madame D' Arblay's Diary.

MRS. SARAH TRIMMER, 1741-1810, daughter of Joshua J. Kirby, and wife of Mr. Trimmer, was born at Ipswich. She was the author of a large number of works, chiefly educational and religious. The following are some of them: Teacher's Assistant, 2 vols; The Economy of Charity; Outline of Ancient History; Outline of Roman History; History of England; Help to the Unlearned in the Study of the Holy Scriptures; Instructive Tales; History of the Robins, etc.

MRS. CATHARINE MACAULAY, 1733-1791, was a writer of some notoriety. She wrote on historical, moral, and political subjects, and was an avowed republican. She was so much of a partisan that her historical writings are regarded as of doubtful credit. She wrote A History of England from the Accession of James II. to that of the Brunswick Line, 8 vols., 4to; A History of England from the Revolution to the Present Time, only one volume finished; Moral Truth, 8vo; Letters on Education, 4to; several political pamphlets. This lady does not appear to have been connected with the great historian of the same name, who in our day has gone over similar historical ground. But in the sharp passage at arms between him and J. Wilson Croker, the latter points his sting in the following style: "Catharine, though now forgotten by an ungrateful public, made quite as much noise in her day as Thomas does in ours."

REV. AULAY MACAULAY, 1797, a Scotchman, educated at the University of Glasgow, and uncle to Thomas Babington Macaulay, wrote Essays on Various Subjects of Taste aud Criticism; Peculiar Advantages of Sunday-Schools, etc.

Mackenzie.

HENRY MACKENZIE, 1745-1831, is well known as a sentimental writer of this period, his Man of Feeling being an acknowledged classic in that line.

Mackenzie was born in Edinburgh, and educated at the University of that city. He practised law, and was appointed Comptroller of Taxes for Scotland. Mackenzie's house was a meeting-place for the select literary and political men of the day. He himself was the author of many works and sketches, which have lost somewhat of their first reputation, but are still read and admired.

Mackenzie's principal works are: The Man of Feeling, the Man of the World, Julia de Roubigné. Besides these larger works, he contributed a great number of papers to The Lounger, The Mirror, and other periodicals. He was also a member of the Committee appointed by the Highland Society to examine into the authenticity of the Ossian Poems. Mackenzie's style resembles closely that of Sterne, and his writings are nearly all of the sentimental order. They are superior to Sterne's in purity of morals, but are decidedly inferior in vigor of invention and play of humor. Mackenzie's short stories are beautifully told.

WILLIAM SMELLIE, 1740-1795, was a prominent Scotch printer, publisher, writer, and naturalist, of the last century, residing in Edinburgh.

One of Smellie's earliest feats was the setting up and correcting of the so-called "immaculate edition" of Terence. He wrote a good part of the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and edited for three years the old Edinburgh Magazine and Review, translated Buffon's Natural History, and Natural History of Birds, and wrote the Philosophy of Natural History, and the lives of John Gregory, Henry Home, Lord Kames, David Hume, and Adam Smith. Besides these, and some other general works, Smellie was the author of numerous miscellaneous contributions to the periodicals.

JAMES TYTLER, 1747-1804, was a Scottish surgeon who emigrated to America during the troublous times of the early French Revolution. His works are very miscella neous in their nature, being partly theological, partly medical, and partly literary. He published a Poetical Translation of the Eclogues of Virgil, a Letter on the Doctrine of Assurance, an Answer to Paine's Age of Reason, a Treatise on the Plague and Yellow Fever, and other works.

JOHN HOWARD, 1726-1790, the philanthropist, was the son of a wealthy tradesman of London, and inherited a large fortune. His labors and sufferings in exploring and exposing the horrors of the public prisons of England and Europe are well known. His only publication of any size was The State of the Prisons in England and Wales. The shocking condition of things there revealed made a lasting impression on the public mind.

Thomas Paine.

THOMAS PAINE, 1736-1809, a political and infidel writer of the last century, acquired great temporary notoriety, partly by his connection with the American and the French Revolutions, and partly by the reckless hardihood of his writings.

Paine was born at Thetford, England, of Quaker parentage, and was brought up to the trade of a stay-maker. At the age of twenty four he removed to London, and was employed as a school-teacher. In London he met with Franklin, and in 1744, at the suggestion of the latter, emigrated to Philadelphia. He sympathized warmly with the Americans in the contest with Great Britain, and in January 1776 published the pamphlet, Common Sense, which made a prodigious sensation, and helped doubtless to precipitate the crisis which took place on the 4th of July following. During the depressing winter of 1776-7, he began the publication of a periodical called The Crisis, the object of which was to encourage the patriots. It appeared at irregular intervals for several years, and was eminently successful. The phrase, "These are the times that try men's souls," originated in The Crisis.

Paine was Secretary to the Committee on Foreign Affairs, of the Continental Congress, from April 1777 to January 1779, and in 1781 he went to France with Col. Laurens, to negotiate a loan for the United States. On his retiring from the service of the United States, in 1785, he was rewarded by a gift of $3000 and the confiscated estate of a royalist near New Rochelle, in New York, consisting of three hundred acres of land. In 1787, Paine returned to France on his own affairs, and in 1791 to London. The terrible ferment of the French Revolution was of just the kind to awaken his

active sympathies, and in 1791-2 he published in London The Rights of Man, in reply to Burke and in advocacy of the most extreme views of the French Republicans. The book had an enormous sale. Its views were so levelling and disorganizing in their scope, and its effect was so great upon the lower classes in Great Britain, who were already in an unsettled and dangerous condition, that the Government was alarmed, and caused Paine to be prosecuted for sedition and libel. He was found guilty, but escaped to France, where he was naturalized, and became a member of the National Convention. He was afterwards excluded from the Convention by Robespierre, and was imprisoned for nearly a year.

In 1794-5, Paine published in London and Paris The Age of Reason, being a scurrilous attack on Christianity. The manuscript of the first part having been submitted to Franklin before publication, Franklin returned it with this answer: "I advise you not to attempt unchaining the tiger, but to burn this piece before it is seen by any other person, whereby you will save yourself a great deal of mortification from the enemies it may raise you, and perhaps a good deal of regret and repentance. If men are so wicked with religion, what would they be without it?"

These words of Franklin seem to have been prophetic. In 1802, Paine, writing to an infidel friend, said, "I am sorry that that work ever went to press. I wrote it more for my own amusement, and to see what I could do, than with any design of benefiting the world. I would give worlds, had I them at my command, had The Age of Reason never been published. . . . I regret the publication of that work exceedingly. It can never do the world any good, and its sarcastic style will doubtless lead thousands to esteem lightly the only book of correct morals that has ever blessed the world."

Paine was a shallow man, whose knowledge was infinitesimal in proportion as his effrontery was infinite. The sensation that he produced was due to the peculiar circumstances of the crisis in which he lived, more than to the ability of the man. His conceit of himself and of what he had done, was of a piece with the rest of his career. He really believed that he had given the death-blow to Christianity. "I have now gone through the Bible as a man would go through a wood, with an axe on his shoulder, to fell trees. Here they lie; and the priests, if they can, may replant them. They may perhaps stick them in the ground, but they will never make them grow." Paine returned to the United States in 1802, and died finally in the city of New York, in great obscurity, his closing years being marked by the coarsest profligacy and intemperance.

Godwin.

William Godwin, 1756-1836, is chiefly known by three works of an entirely different character: A Life of Chaucer, in two ponderous quarto volumes; the novel of Caleb Williams, in which the element of the terrible was employed with a power hardly equalled elsewhere in English literature; and an abstruse work on Political Justice, in which the attempt was made to undermine the entire fabric of society, morals, and religion.

Career. Godwin was the son of a Dissenting minister, and was himself, for some years, minister to a Dissenting congregation. But at

the
age of twenty-six he abandoned the ministry, and gave himself up
to literature as a profession, making London his permanent residence.
He was married somewhat late in life, 1797, at the age of forty-one,
to the notorious Mary Wollstonecraft, and after her death was mar-
ried a second time. He was for some years a bookseller, and a prin-
cipal conductor of the New Annual Register.

Godwin's writings are numerous, and are of several distinct kinds, philosophical, political, fictitious, biographical, and poetical, and in each he achieved distinction, though of a sort hardly to be envied.

An Inquiry concerning Political Justice, 2 vols., 4to, was published in 1793, and excited in thoughtful minds a degree of alarm approaching to consternation. It was abstruse and unattractive in form and style, but in its principles it threatened to upset all the established foundations of society and civil government; and the feverish state of the public mind, consequent upon the French Revolution, gave the book a degree of notoriety and power which at any other time it would never have received. "No work of our time gave such a blow to the philosophical mind of the country as the celebrated Inquiry concerning Political Justice. Tom Paine was considered for the time a Tom Fool to him; Paley an old woman; Edmund Burke a flashy sophist."-Hazlitt. "This was a bold and astounding piece of levelization, pardonable only as having been conceived in the madness of a distracting period in the history and affairs of Europe. It became so popular that the poorest mechanics were known to club subscriptions for its purchase, and thus was it directed to mine and eat away contentment from a nation's roots."- Lond. Gent. Mag.

Godwin wrote also The Enquirer, Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature; On Population, being an Inquiry concerning the Power of Increase in the Numbers of Mankind, a reply to Malthus; Thoughts on Man, his Nature, Productions, and Discoveries; Letters of Verax to the Morning Chronicle on the Present War (1815), and several other political pamphlets.

Godwin's first novel, Caleb Williams, created as much of a sensation as his Political Justice. It involves a dark mystery, and deals largely in the tragic and the terrible.

"Caleb Williams, the earliest, is also the most popular, of our author's romances, not because his latter works have been less rich in sentiment and passion, but because they are, for the most part, confined to the development of single characters; while in this there is the opposition and death-grapple of two beings, each endowed with poignant sensibilities and quenchless energy. There is no work of fiction which more rivets the attention-no tragedy which exhibits a struggle more sublime or sufferings more intense than this; yet to produce the effect, no complicated machinery is employed, but the springs of action are few and simple. The motives are at once common and elevated, and are purely intellectual, without appearing for an instant inadequate to their mighty issues."— Sir T. N. Talfourd.

"Caleb Williams is the cream of his mind, the rest are the skimmed milk; yet in that wondrous novel all must be offended with the unnatural and improbable character of Falkland; the most accomplished, the most heroical and lofty-minded of men, murders one who had affronted him, allows others to hang for the deed, and persecuțes