SHORT ARTICLES.- The Mormons, 297.-Mortality among the Society of Friends, 300.— Bayard Taylor's El dorado, 327.-A Nobleman slandered, 333.-Mrs. Wright and her Irish acquaintance, 334.-A Busy Solitude; New Books, 335.

Of all the Periodical Journals devoted to literature and science which abound in Europe and in this country, this has appeared to me the most useful. It contains indeed the exposition only of the current literature of the Englis language, but this, by its mense extent and comprehension, includes a portraiture of the human mind in the utmos' expansion of the present age. J Q. ADAMS

LITTELL'S LIVING AGE.-No. 327.-24 AUGUST, 1850.

From the Quarterly Review.

chusetts"-"A Wagoner in the County of SaDr. Johnson; his Religious Life and his Death. lop"-" A Second Wagoner in Shropshire"-By the author of "Doctor Hookwell," "The" A Lady in the Isle of Mull"-" Mrs. PallisPrimitive Church in its Episcopacy," &c. 8vo, ter"-" A Manx Servant Maid and a Hare"

PP. 528. 1850. Reprinted by Harper and other "Manx Enthusiasts," &c., &c. And hav

Brothers. New York.

ing spent two pages in these heterogeneous, and most of them ludicrously trivial stories, he at length remembers Dr. Johnson—

But let us come to what may be called Dr. Johnson's superstitions.

And after another dozen pages of similar rambling-barely rational-he winds up the whole chapter of "Johnson Superstitions" with—

Johnson was not superstitions;

which is very like the celebrated chapter of Horrebow's Iceland, which he might have found in

AMONGST the audacities of book-making, we remember nothing so bold as "Doctor Hookwell." The religious and literary world do not need to be reminded that the vicarage of Leeds is worthily filled by Dr. Walter Farquhar Hook, well known for his various theological publications, and for the higher merit of an intelligent and indefatigable discharge of his pastoral duties. This eminent divine, the author of "Doctor Hookwell" has made the hero of a three-volumed novel, with no other veil than the syllable added to his name, but prefixing his initials-W. F.-and subjoining in full letters his description as Vicar of Leeds. This strange indelicacy of bringing forward a living clergyman as the hero of a work of fiction, becomes practically less offensive from the ex-island. treme absurdity and insipidity of the performance. It is foreign to our present purpose to inquire whether there are any doctrines attributed to Doctor Hookwell that Dr. Hook need disclaim, though we can have no doubt both his modesty and good taste must be offended by the very gross and clumsy panegyrics pronounced on his shadow. in which, after slightly mentioning four or five of But what concerns us on this occasion, is, that the Johnson's, our author says,

Boswell

CHAPTER LXXII.-CONCERNING SNAKES. There are no snakes to be met with on the

taphs-none of them very remarkable, but all full So, also, because Dr. Johnson wrote a few epiof grave and dignified feeling-we have a chapter of

"EPITAPHS;"

mode on which that work was concocted, is evi- Perhaps in no one department of writing has the dently repeated in this new one ;-namely, that varied talent of mankind been more displayed than the author being in the habit of keeping a com- in the writing of epitaphs. Some inscriptions are mon-place book, took on the former occasion Dr. of a witty, or serio-comic nature; some laudatory Hook, and now takes Dr. Johnson as the text on of the dead, at the expense of the characters of the which he may spin out into a bulky publication living; some enigmatical; some expressing lamenall the scattered and frequently worthless scraps sorts largely abounding in Grecian and Roman, as tations in true poetry. We find specimens of these of his desultory reading ;-secondly, that this is well as in English literature. Let a few examdone by one who, extensive as his common-ples, from modern sources, be given.—p. 439. placing may be, seems incredibly ignorant or neg

ligent of matters that everybody else knows And then he proceeds to copy out of his commonthirdly, that he has entirely, and, as it seems, in-place book some couple of dozen epitaphs, of tentionally misrepresented a leading and important which the two or three that were worth copying circumstance of that which forms the professed even into a scrap-book, are to be found in every object of his work. collection, and hardly one of the rest would deOf his expertness in the noble art of tumefac-serve admission into any. What do our readers tion, our readers will see, that, to avoid the same think of the following as illustrations of the reerror, our examples must be sparing. The chap-ligious life and death of Doctor Johnson ?—

ter headed

66 HIS SUPERSTITION"

is a collection of anecdotes concerning superstitions, and belief in witches, fairies, ghosts, &c.,

Reputed to be inscribed on a tombstone in the churchyard of Llandinabo, in Herefordshire : Templum, Bellum, Spelunca,

Reader!

De Terrâ in Arcû.

you must at once be given the meaning in "The Ancient Greeks and Romans"- -"Alex- of this, for probably you would rack your brains

ander the Great"-" Pliny"-" The Haunted in vain.
House at Athens"-"The Poet Prudentius"-
"Sir M. Hale"-" Dr. Cotton Mather of Massa-
CCCXXVII. LIVING AGE. VOL. XXVI. 22

Here it is:

CHURCH-WAR-DEN

OF LLAND-IN-A-BO.-P. 443.

Or of this:

Here lies I, at the Church door;
Here lies I, because I's poor!
The farther you go, the more you pay;
Here lies I, as warm as they !-p. 441.

Or of his quoting as an epitaph six out of eighteen
lines of a doggerel libel which appeared in the
periodicals of the day, (1747,) against (which our
author does not seem to have suspected) the cel
ebrated Vice-Admiral Lestock?

Cecil" does not hesitate to confess that "he was much indebted to his MOTHER," and even "felt the Loss of his FATHER," (p. 11.) The capitals are in the original, and mark very properly the singularity and importance of the facts they refer to.

These scanty specimens must suffice to explain our first objection, namely, that Johnson's name is made the peg on which to hang up or rather the line on which to hang out-much hackneyed sentimentality, and some borrowed learning, with an awful and overpowering quantity of twaddle and rigmarole.

By a similar process, whenever Johnson, or any one else, happens in Boswell's great repository of table-talk to mention any name that our author can find, either in his own common-place book or Our second, though not applying so extensively, the Biographical Dictionaries, he seldom fails to is, as regards any reliance on the compiler's aufavor us with a digression, shorter or longer, con- thority, still more serious. To begin with his cerning not only the person thus named, but any anachronisms. He calls Addison "the contempoother persons that he can hook well or ill into the rary of Johnson." It is true they were alive same category. For instance, Johnson saw Dr. together for a few years. So were William III. Blacklock twice in his life, at two breakfasts; on and George II., for a longer period, but who ever the first occasion, Johnson says, with a warmth thought of calling them contemporaries? accounted for by Blacklock's misfortune, "Dear thinks Dr. Blacklock, I am glad to see you." This casual expression of Johnson's sympathy and civility, our author exaggerates into

Dr. Johnson showed much friendship to the blind poet and divine ;

and then runs off into six pages about blind poets, in which he takes occasion to inform the world that Milton also was a blind poet, and that a certain Dr. Lucas was a blind divine. And he further, on Lucas' authority, acquaints us that Homer, Appius, Cn. Aufidius, Didymus, Walkup, Père Jean l'Aveugle, &c., all of them eminent for their service and usefulness,

were as blind as Lucas.-p. 268.

But let it not be supposed that he always makes these digressions without due apology and justification. For instance, when mentioning the curious fact that Dr. Johnson had a mother, he takes occasion to say that other people also have had mothers, and even fathers, and have found them very useful helps, particularly to their first steps

in life :

Here we may be permitted ["prodigious bold request"] to observe the usefulness of parental education. How many children, before escaping from the nursery, have learned lessons of virtue from a mother or a father, that have never been forgotten!-p. 11.

And then he goes on to enumerate several distinguished persons, who, "like Johnson," were under obligations to their mothers-for instance, Adam Clarke, and Lord Byron :

He

probably that excellent paper, in the Rambler, on capital punishment, was written with the fate of poor Dodd in his view. p. 188.

The Rambler terminated early in 1752. Dodd's misfortune was in 1777, just a quarter of a century later.

He censures the "fulsome eulogy" of Pope's dedication of Parnell's Poems to Lord Oxford,

although it was during his lordship's descent from the height of political power," (p. 259.) Lord Oxford's fall, as everybody but this writer knows, was in 1714; and Pope's verses, about the most feeling and elegant that he ever wrote, were in 1721.

He talks too of "Prynne the regicide," (p. 379.) It seems strange that one who seems to have books about him should not have known that the wayward Prynne, after his early opposition to, and sufferings from, the court, had, before the king's trial, become almost if not quite a royalist.

These, and twenty others of the like, though very strange in a gentleman who ascends so high a chair of instruction, might be passed over as mere proofs of a bad memory; but here is a deliberate, complicated, and yet flagrant blunder, which so astounded us that it is not without some degree of lingering hesitation that we believe our own eyes while we copy it. Every one at all acquainted with either the history of Johnson, or the history of England, is acquainted with Mr. Windham, the friend of Burke, of Fox, of Pitt, and of Grenville-a distinguished statesman in an age of statesmen-an eloquent orator in the midst

-but of all maternal patterns the mother of St. of the greatest orators the British senate can Augustin ranks the first.-p. 11.

Though, if our author knows no more of Saint Monica than he evidently does of poor Mrs. Byron, his praise of a maternal pattern is not worth much. He further thinks it necessary to quote the very passage in which the "Rev. Robert

boast a man in all respects among the most conspicuous of his day. Well! Mr. Windham we all know, amongst his many distinctions, had that of Johnson's friendship, and of having eminently deserved it. To him Johnson when dying gave with his own hand a copy of the New Testament, with this affecting allocution-" Extremum hoc

munus morientis habeto;" and to Mr. Windham's | dissenter, and the other one Mr. Winstanley, a generosity he bequeathed a kind of guardianship clergyman who seems to have been thought of for over the welfare of his poor servant Francis. this the author remarks

On

Thus was Johnson faithful to the last to the poor and friendless, and Mr. Windham no less declared by his willing compliance his own acknowledged manliness of mind.*. *-p. 490.

To which he subjoins the following note:

66

* For example of this, see Mr. Windham's published speeches in Parliament, delivered in the House of Clinabs," (Commons), under the disguised name of Gumdahm;" at least so was it in Dr. Johnson's day. Windham was one of the most eloquent of that respectable body of patriots that leagued together against Sir R. Walpole; who, while almost all the men of wit and genius opposed him, is said to have paid in vain above fifty thousand pounds to paltry scribblers in his defence.-ib.

some peculiarity in his opinions different from those of Johnson's own religious attendants. Both these stories, besides being in themselves flagrantly absurd, were completely refuted by Mr. Croker in his edition of Boswell, and by ourselves in our review of Hannah More's Letters (Q. Rev., vol. lii. p. 431;) but when, after having been thus demolished, they are brought forth again-and one of them with an additional falsehood-by an author who professes to be at once a strenuous churchman and a sincere admirer of Dr. Johnson's religious feelings, it becomes a duty to repeat the denial and expose over again the imposture.

66

We need not again enter into the details of these pious frauds, but, as regards this reproduction of them, we must observe, in the first place, that this writer-after professing (p. vii.) that he will adopt no Johnsoniana," nor any less authentic work than Boswell's, and that only (he adds) in And then he proceeds to extract some anecdotes Croker's last edition (the single volume 8vo.)— of this Mr. Windham-Gumdahm, from the "Me- reproduces these two "anecdotes" without a hint moirs of his intimate friend, Mr. Wilberforce." that they are, in the volume he professes to follow, Our youngest readers partake our astonishment. denounced as certainly and manifestly untrue. This The author, they see, imagines that Burke's, John-is not merely a suppressio veri-it is a suggestio son's, and Wilberforce's friend, Mr. Windham, falsi-as if Boswell and Croker had taken the who died in 1811, was no other than Sir William same view of these stories that he does; Boswell Wyndham, the friend of Pope, Swift, and Boling-not having dreamt of them, and Croker having exbroke, who died in 1740-and that Mr. Windham's posed and stigmatized them; but he does worsespeeches in the Times and the Morning Post were much worse. The very fabricators of the first the same that had been published sixty years before story were forced to confess its failure. The in the Gentleman's Magazine as the orations of authority for the second was an anonymous extract Gumdahm, in the House of Clinabs, in the parlia- of an anonymous letter, found by Hannah More's ment of Lilliput !!! executors amongst the mass of her papers, and by We invite our readers to think over what a them published-injudiciously and unwarrantably mass and complication of blunders and ignorance-in her correspondence, but without any pretence of English politics and literature these paragraphs that she had any concern whatsoever with the reveal, and what we are to think of the sagacity paper, nor any proof that she believed or had even and reading of an author who imagines that the ever seen it. In short, Hannah More, even on her tory baronet of Queen Anne's reign was the whig sapient editor's own showing, had no more to do statesman of George the Third's. with any portion of the affair than the Queen of Sheba. But then comes our present author-a professed admirer of Dr. Johnson—who, with all the facts before his eyes, and seeing that the original fable is untenable, boldly discards all minor machinery-and at once attributes the anonymous letter to Hannah More's own pen-"Hannah More tells us," (p. 497;) and then repeats the whole Winstanley story as " told to Hannah More" by the original authority, and by her again related, (p. 498.) This extravagant misrepresentation is made with so much detail, and the authority of Hannah More is produced and reproduced with so much confidence, that it is difficult to attribute it to mere blundering-and what renders all this more curious is, that the writer adds a note, which, to an ordinary reader, would look like an authentication of the story, stating that he himself is the great grandson of this very Mr. Winstanley, the hero of the "anecdote." Whether this circumstance had such an effect on the author's amour propre as to blind him to the inconsistencies of the story and to the bad faith of the evidence on which he supports

All these blunders are, however, so obvious, and of course so innocuous, that we should not have thought them nor the volume which enshrines them worth our particular notice, but for a gross, and we fear an intentional, misrepresentation of an important point in what is avowed to be the chief topic of the reverend author's work—the religious feelings of Dr. Johnson.

The writer, with his systematic see-saw of quotations, can be wholly consistent on no subject; but he generally does Dr. Johnson the justice of representing him as a steadfast, devout, and affectionate member of the Church of England ;-it would seem that this was what he mainly desired to inculcate; and, by closely following Boswell, he substantially adheres to that text, till at the last moment he is pleased to revive a couple of silly sectarian fables-to the effect that Dr. Johnson in his dying moments, though attended by two near and dear friends, clergymen of the established church, endeavored to obtain more religious comfort from two other persons, one a Mr. Latrobe, a

it, we do not presume to say. the facts before the public.

We can only lay | Venn and Newman, Hampden and Pusey-in short, everybody from every side-with a sort of universal complaisance only to be accounted for by Louis Blanc's explanation of Lamartine's general panegyrics-that he flatters everybody in hopes that everybody may flatter him. But the Reverend R. Armitage's brave thirst of praise is too strong to wait for the slow returns of literary gratitude, and he accordingly produces from "his own little vineyard," a draught of eulogy more luscious, and evidently more intoxicating, than he could hope to receive from any other, however friendly, hand. To his "Essay on the Primitive Church," he has added eight supplemental pages of what will our readers guess?-of newspaper puffs on Dr. Hookwell. We must find room for a few specimens of these curiosities of literature. Heretofore we have had

Our readers no doubt would be glad to know who the writer is who has contrived to distinguish himself by such stupendous blunders. He is certainly a curiosity, and quite as worthy of individual exhibition as any author in Madame Tussaud's Temple of Fame. As he has chosen to wear a mask-or at least a half mask—like a king at a masquerade who fancies that every one must recognize him, we will not undertake to name him positively, but we think that we may venture to look for some traces of his identity in "Doctor Hookwell." The hero en second of that work is a certain Reverend Reginald Armitage, a young clergyman of great learning, talents, and accomplishment

:

A young man of considerable parts, but of a reserved and bashful demeanor. Those who knew to lament that booksellers and publishers have rehim intimately, loved him as their own souls. His course to these arts; this, we believe, is the first charity knew no bounds, and thus he won the time when an author has amalgamated such unhearts of the poor, while his name and station in-worthy trash with his own work—a work, too, troduced him into the best society, [With] his on so grave a subject as the "Primitive Church.” natural sweetness of disposition and his freedom from narrowness of feeling, it cannot be said that he belonged to any party or faction in the church, for he worked alone in his own little vineyard. His quiet, earnest, sincere style, like the speaking of Sir Samuel Romilly, was not only acceptable but captivating.

A kinder soul [said his poorer neighbors] never breathed life; and what a power of learning and goodness that young man takes to his share!-Dr. Hookwell, vol. i., pp. 22, 88.

As we see that the chief character of the novel affects to be a portrait from the life, and is so near an approach to the real name, we are led to a suspicion that the second character may be simi-a larly adumbrated, and that this same Reverend Reginald Armitage may be intended to indicate as the kind-hearted, learned, liberal, eloquent, and, above all, reserved and bashful author of Dr. Hookwell-a Reverend Robert Armitage, who we see in the clergy list is rector of Much Wenlock in Shropshire.

Such an extravagance of panegyric seems at first sight to negative the possibility of its being published by a modest and retiring country clergyman as his own portrait, but, on the other hand, the hypothesis receives a strong confirmation from a more recent and very curious circumstance. The same "author of Dr. Hookwell" has lately published a volume on The Primitive Church in its Episcopacy, of the body of which work we do not venture to give any detailed opinion, for we must confess that, not expecting to find him better acquainted with Ignatius and Polycarp than he is with Regicide Prynne and Gumdahm of the Clinabs, we have not cut open the leaves; but in the hasty glance we have taken of it it seems to us to be, like "Dr. Hookwell" and "The Life of Johnson," a farrago of confused and contradictory excerpts from the most opposite sources. We see quoted with, it seems, equal satisfaction, Hoadly and Beveridge, Gladstone and Mac Neil,

Birmingham Advertiser.―The pages of Dr. Hookwell have met with the public approval of Sir Robert Peel.-Primitive Church, p. 277.

Amidst Sir Robert Peel's various panegyrics on Free Traders, that on this extensive free trader in literature has escaped us.

Morning Post.-Eminently pleasing in style, instinct with a full and observant love of nature, character in its various human shades, as well as in its religious varieties, the author treats with a ready and masculine perception.-ib., p. 277.

Chester Courant, Oct. 4.-We shall consider it public duty to extract portions of this very superior production. Such a work has not, we think, appeared for some time past on so stirring a subHookwell, and benefit thereby; it will disarm many ject. Thousands, we are convinced, will read Dr. of the enemies of the church, and render others stronger and firmer in her defence, through the noble sentiments, authorities, and truths scattered through these splendid volumes.-ib., p. 279.

Cumberland Packet, October.-This work is evi

dently from the pen of a most acute observer, a sincere, zealous, and powerful advocate of the church, and in all that belongs to an intelligent mind, a distinguished ornament.-ib., p. 279.

Oxford British Queen.-It was said that Lord John Manners, or Mr. M. Milnes, M. P., had written it; but some spoke of a rural clergyman, walking with Wordsworth as his daily companion.

Dr.

Jelf
says it is just the book for the age, erudite and
eloquent, lacking quaintness and archaism of expres-
sion. It is marvellous how every anecdote of Dr.
Hookwell has reached Oxford, and the new novel
about him is devoured with absolute enthusiasm.—
ib., 280.

Oxford British Queen.-Of this seasonable and excellent work our praise must be unqualified. Its principles are put forward in a spirit of firmness, moderation, and candor, and in such language as may, without a semblance of flattery, be termed argumentative, eloquent, and affectionate.-ib., p. 280.

Bath Herald, July 1.-All the world seem to have been reading the new work entitled Dr.