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 miscellaneous 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 principal 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 cel ebrated 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 inade quate 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 char acter 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 persecutes

to the brink of ruin a man whose sole sin was a desire to penetrate through the mystery in which this prodigy of vice and virtue had wrapped himself.” — Allan Cunningham. Godwin's other works of fiction are: St. Leon, a Tale of the Sixteenth Century; Mandeville, a Tale of the Seventeenth Century; Fleetwood, or The New Man of Feeling; and Cloudesley, a novel. He made two attempts at dramatic composition: Antonio, or The Soldier's Return, a Tragedy; Faulkner, a Tragedy. Both were hooted off the stage.

In biography and history, Godwin wrote The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2 vols., 4to, a most unwieldy, lumbering performance; Life of the Earl of Chatham; Lives of Edward and John Phillips, nephews and pupils of Milton; History of the Commonwealth of England, 4 vols., 8vo; Sketches of History; Lives of the Necromancers; Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin.

"In his life of Mary Wollstonecraft he has written little and said much; and in his account of Chaucer, he has written much and said little. It has been said that a spoonful of truth will color an ocean of fiction; and so it is seen in Godwin's Life of Chaucer; he heaps conjecture upon conjecture, dream upon dream,-theory upon theory; scatters learning all around, and shows everywhere a deep sense of the merits of the poet; yet all that he has related might have been told in a twentieth part of the space which he has taken." -Allan Cunningham.

"The perusal of this title excited no small surprise in our critical fraternity. The authenticated passages of Chaucer's life may be comprised in half a dozen pages; and behold two voluminous quartos! We have said that Mr. Godwin had two modes of wire-drawing and prolonging his narrative. The first is, as we have seen, by looking in the description and history of everything that existed upon earth at the time of Chaucer. In this kind of composition, we usually lose sight entirely of the proposed subject of Mr. Godwin's lucubrations, travelling to Rome or to Palestine with as little remorse as if poor Chaucer had never been mentioned in the title-page. The second mode is considerably more ingenious, and consists in making old Geoffrey accompany the author upon these striking excursions. For example, Mr. Godwin has a fancy to describe a judicial trial. Nothing can be more easily introduced; for Chaucer certainly studied at the Temple, and is supposed to have been bred to the bar."—Sir Walter Scott.

Mary Wollstonecraft.

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT, afterwards Mrs. Godwin, 1759-1797, was notorious in her day, partly by the irregularities of her life, and partly by her writings, which were not without substantial merit, and which provoked discussion by their unfeminine freedom of style and thought.

She was for a time engaged in teaching school in the neighborhood of London, and then for a time was governess in a family of rank. In 1786, being then twenty-seven years old, she began authorship, and published successively Thoughts on the Education of Daughters; Mary, a Fiction; Original Stories from Real Life; The Female Reader; Salzman's Elements of Morality and Lavater's Physiognomy, translated and abridged; Answer to Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution; Vindication of the Rights of Women; Moral and Historical View of the French Revolution; Letters from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, etc.

She was married at the age of thirty-seven to Godwin the novelist, and died the year following, leaving an infant daughter, who became the wife of the poet Percy Byshe Shelley.

"No woman (with the exception of the greatest woman, Madame de Staël,) has made any impression on the public mind during the last fifty years to be compared with Mrs. Godwin. This was, perhaps, more especially true in the provinces, where her new and startling doctrines were received with avidity, and acted upon in some particulars to a considerable extent, particularly by married women. She was, I have been told by an intimate friend, very pretty and feminine in manners and person; much attached to those very observances which she decries in her works; so that if any gentleman did not fly to open the door as she approached it, or take up the handkerchief which she dropped, she showered on him the full weight of reproach and displeasure; an inconsistency she would have doubtless despised in a disciple."-Ellwood's Literary Ladies of England.

Theobald Wolfe Tone.

THEOBALD WOLFE TONE, 1763–1798, is more celebrated as a man than as an author.

Tone's political writings, together with an account of his life, were published after his death by his son, William T. W. Tone, in 1826. Tone published in 1790 a pamphlet, very bitter in its spirit, on the policy of the English Government of England, and also founded the Society of United Irishmen. He was one of the victims of English terrorism in Ireland at the close of the last century, was sentenced to death for treason, but escaped the execution of the sentence by cutting his throat in prison. His son, the editor of his writings, served in the French army under Napoleon, and, after the downfall of the empire, emigrated to America and joined the army of the United States.

JOHN LOUIS DE LOLME, 1745-1807, a native of Switzerland, resided some years in England, and while there wrote several works, chiefly on public affairs: A Parallel between the English Government and the Former Government of Sweden; The Constitution of England: Strictures on the Union of Scotland with England; History of the Flagellants, etc. De Lolme was a great admirer of the English Constitution.

THOMAS DAY, 1748-1789, was a lawyer by profession, but having by inheritance an ample fortune, he never engaged in practice. He was fond of literary pursuits, and wrote a good deal both in prose and verse. His writings were mostly in advocacy of political and social reforms. He took the part of the Americans in the controversy between the Colonies and the mother country, and he was strongly opposed to African slavery. His publications are the following: The Devoted Legions, a Poem against the War with America; The Desolation of America, a Poem; Letters of Marius; Reflections on the Present State of England and the Independence of America; The Dying Negro; The History of Little Jack; The History of Sandford and Merton. The work last named was the most popular of all, and has acquired a permanent place in English literature.

JOHN MILLER, 1735-1801, a native of Scotland, was educated at Glasgow University, and was afterwards professor in the legal faculty of that institution. His two principal works are: Observations on the Origin and Distinction of Ranks in Society, and