his greatness or power; and if we are made only to bear our part in a system, without any regard to our own particular happiness, we can no longer worship him as our all-bounteous parent; there is no meaning in the term. The idea of his malevolence (an impiety I tremble to write) must succeed. We have nothing left but our fears, and those, too, vain; for whither can they lead but to despair, and the sad desire of annihilation? If, then, justice and goodness be not the same in God as in our ideas, we mean nothing when we say that God is necessarily just and good; and, for the same reason, it may as well be said that we know not what we mean, when, according to Dr. Clarke (Evid. 26th), we affirm that he is necessarily a wise and intelligent being. What then can Lord Bolingbroke mean, when he says that everything shows the wisdom of God; and yet adds, everything does not show in like manner the goodness of God conformably to our ideas of this attribute in either? By wisdom, he must only mean, that God knows and employs the fittest means to a certain end, no matter what that end may be: this, indeed, is a proof of knowledge and intelligence, but these alone do not constitute wisdom; the word implies the application of these fittest means to the best and kindest ends-or who will call it true wisdom? even amongst ourselves it is not held as such. All the attributes, then, that he seems to think apparent in the constitution of things, are his unity, infinity, eternity, and intelligence, from no one of which, I boldly affirm, can result any duty of gratitude or adoration incumbent on mankind, more than if he, and all things round him, were produced, as some have dared to think, by the necessary working of eternal matter in an infinite vacuum: for what does it avail to add intelligence to those other physical attributes, unless that intelligence be directed, not only to the good of the whole, but also to the good of every individual, of which the whole is composed. "It is therefore no impiety, but the direct contrary, to say that human justice and the other virtues, which are indeed only various applications of human benevolence, bear some resemblance to the moral attributes of the Supreme Being: it is only by means of that resemblance we conceive them in him, or their effects in his works it is by the same means only that we comprehend those physical attributes which his Lordship allows to be demonstrable. How can we form any notion of his unity, but from that unity of : which we ourselves are conscious? how of his existence, but from our own consciousness of existing? how of his power, but of that power which we experience in ourselves? Yet neither Lord Bolingbroke nor any other man, that thought on these subjects, ever believed that these our ideas were real and full representations of these attributes in Divinity. They say he knows; they do not mean that he compares ideas which he has acquired from sensation, and draws conclusions from them. They say he acts: they do not mean by impulse, nor as the soul acts on an organised body. They say he is omnipotent and eternal: yet on what are their ideas founded, but on our own narrow conceptions of space and duration, prolonged beyond the bounds of space and time? Either, therefore, there is a resemblance and analogy (however imperfect and distant) between the attributes of the Divinity and our conceptions of them, or we cannot have any conceptions of them at all: he allows we ought to reason from earth, that we do know, to heaven, which we do not know how can we do so but by that affinity which appears between one and the other? "In vain, then, does my Lord attempt to ridicule the warm but melancholy imagination of Mr. Wollaston in that fine soliloquy: 'Must I then bid my last farewell to these walks when I close these lids, and yonder blue regions and all this scene darken upon me and go out? Must I then only furnish dust to be mingled with the ashes of these herds and plants, or with this dirt under my feet? Have I been set so far above them in life, only to be levelled with them in death?" No thinking head, no heart, that has the least sensibility, but must have made the same reflection; or at least must feel not the beauty alone, but the truth of it, when he hears it from the mouth of another. Now, what reply will Lord Bolingbroke make to these questions which are put to him, not only by Wollaston, but by all mankind? He will tell you that we, that is, the animals, vegetables, stones, and other clods of earth, are all connected in one immense design; that we are all dramatis personæ in different characters, and that we were not made for ourselves, but for the action; that it is foolish, presumptuous, impious, and profane to murmur against the Almighty author of this drama, when we feel ourselves unavoidably unhappy. On the contrary, we ought to rest our head on the soft pillow of resignation, on the immoveable rock of tranquillity; secure, that if our pains and afflictions grow violent indeed, an immediate end will be put to our miserable being, and we shall be mingled with the dirt under our feet, a thing common to all the animal kind; and of which he who complains does not seem to have been set by his reason so far above them in life, as to deserve not to be mingled with them in death. Such is the consolation his philosophy gives us, and such is the hope on which his tranquillity was founded." (Memoir in Mathias's Edition.-Life by Mitford.-Johnson's Lives of the Poets.) BROOME AND WEST. THERE are two Etonians of the first half of this century, whom Johnson has ranked among the English poets: and, in deference to so high an authority, I have abridged and inserted his memoirs of their Lives. But I have searched in vain for any favourable specimen of their poetry which I might transfer to these pages. These two are BROOME and WEST: not Gray's friend, Richard West, but Gilbert West, a friend of Lord Lyttelton. Johnson says of the first, "William Broome was born in Cheshire, as is said, of very mean parents. Of the place of his birth, or the first part of his life, I have not been able to gain any intelligence. He was educated upon the foundation at Eton, and was Captain of the school a whole year, without any vacancy by which he might obtain a scholarship at King's College. Being by this delay, such as is said to have happened very rarely, superannuated, he was sent to St. John's College by the contributions of his friends, where he obtained a small exhibition." Johnson must be inaccurate as to Broome being Captain of a year in which no vacancy at King's occurred. No year wholly blank of resignations is recorded in the Registrum Regale from 1653 to 1756. Broome must have been at Eton soon after 1700. I suppose the fact to have been, that Broome's seniors in his year went off to King's soon after Election, and that Broome remained Captain till the next election, without another resignation coming. Johnson proceeds to speak of Broome's career at Cambridge, says, "He was introduced to Mr. Pope, who was then visiting Sir John Cotton at Madingley, near Cambridge, and gained so much by his esteem, that he was employed, I believe, to make and 7 Mathias's Works of Gray, vol. i. pp. 370-374. extracts from Eustathius for the notes to the translation of the 'Iliad;' and in the volumes of poetry published by Lintot, commonly called 'Pope's Miscellanies,' many of his early pieces were inserted. Pope and Broome were to be more closely connected. When the success of the Iliad' gave encouragement to a version of the Odyssey,' Pope, weary of the toil, called Fenton and Broome to his assistance, and, taking only half the work upon himself, divided the other half between his partners, giving four books to Fenton and eight to Broome. Fenton's books I have enumerated in his life; to the lot of Broome fell the second, sixth, eighth, eleventh, twelfth, sixteenth, eighteenth, and twenty-third, together with the burden of writing all the notes. "As this translation is a very important event in poetical history, the reader has a right to know upon what grounds I establish my narration. That the version was not wholly Pope's was always known; he had mentioned the assistance of two friends in his proposals, and at the end of the work some account is given by Broome of their different parts, which, however, mentions only five books as written by the coadjutors; the fourth and twentieth by Fenton; the sixth, the eleventh, and eighteenth by himself; though Pope, in an advertisement prefixed afterwards to a new volume of his works, claimed only twelve. A natural curiosity, after the real conduct of so great an undertaking, incited me once to inquire of Dr. Warburton, who told me, in his warm language, that he thought the relation given in the note a 'lie;' but that he was not able to ascertain the several shares. The intelligence which Dr. Warburton could not afford me I obtained from Mr. Langton, to whom Mr. Spence had imparted it. "Broome probably considered himself as injured, and there was for some time more than coldness between him and his employer. He always spoke of Pope as too much a lover of money, and Pope pursued him with avowed hostility; for he not only named him disrespectfully in the 'Dunciad,' but quoted him more than once in the Bathos,' as a proficient in the Art of Sinking;' and in his enumeration of the different kinds of poets distinguished for the profound, he reckons Broome among the parrots who repeat another's words in such a hoarse odd tone as makes them seem their own.' I have been told that they were afterwards reconciled; but I am afraid their peace was without friendship. He was "He never rose to very high dignity in the Church. sometime rector of Sturton in Suffolk, where he married a rich widow, and afterwards, when the King visited Cambridge (1728), became Doctor of Laws. He was (1733) presented by the Crown to the rectory of Pulham in Norfolk, which he held with Oakley Magna in Suffolk, given him by the Lord Cornwallis, to whom he was chaplain, and who added the vicarage of Eye in Suffolk; he then resigned Pulham, and retained the two other. "Of Broome, though it cannot be said that he was a great poet, it would be unjust to deny that he was an excellent versifier; his lines are smooth and sonorous, and his diction is select and elegant. His rhymes are sometimes unsuitable; in his 'Melancholy,' he makes breath rhyme to birth in one place, and to earth in another. Those faults occur but seldom; and he had such power of words and numbers as fitted him for translation; but, in his original works, recollection seems to have been his business more than invention. His imitations are so apparent, that it is part of his reader's employment to recal the verses of some former poet. To detect his imitations were tedious and useless. What he takes he seldom makes worse; whom Pope chose for an associate, and whose co-operation was considered by Pope's enemies as so important, that he was attacked by Henly with this ludicrous distich : 'Pope came off clean with Homer; but they say I next subjoin an epitome of Johnson's account of Gilbert West. It is curious to see Johnson so complaisant to these rather dingy cygnets after his treatment of such a swan as Gray :— "West was the son of the Reverend Dr. West, perhaps him who published 'Pindar' at Oxford, about the beginning of this century. His mother was sister to Sir Richard Temple, afterwards Lord Cobham. His father, purposing to educate him for the Church, sent him first to Eton, and afterwards to Oxford; but he was seduced to a more airy mode of life, by a commission in a troop of horse procured him by his uncle. He continued sometime in the army, though it is reasonable to suppose he never sunk into a mere soldier, nor ever lost the love or much neglected the pursuit of learning; and afterwards, finding himself more inclined to civil employment, he laid down his commission, and |