must, in "composing this work, have felt no ordinary anxiety to do the king such justice as consisted with strict truth, and that he would, accordingly, have closely investigated a report exculpatory of his majesty, as tending to shew that he had been kinder, than the world has been given to believe, to Sheridan. As, however, Mr. Moore has not noticed the face Dove stated we must take it for granted, that he neither he the rumour of it, nor found any trace of it in the course of his inquiries; and this is the more singular, as it lay in the direct track in which information concerning Sheridan might have been sought. Had he known the fact he must have published it; because Mr. Moore must be well aware, that the cause to which he professes himself a friend must be promoted by truth; our battle is to be fought with the arms of truth, our victory is to be won by truth, and when we give those opposed to us the benefit of truth, we extend the field of our own power. Whatever may have been the cause of the omission in question, whether it has arisen from ignorance or indolence, it is undoubtedly injurious to the credit of the book-where we find one deficiency, we suspect others. Others, too, there are, but of another and less invidious nature. The part which Sheridan took on the mutiny in the navy, is passed over with a vague reference to history, though it is the especial province of a biographer, to state all he knows of the subject of his labours, and thus to provide, in some degree, against the accidents of tradition. How many valuable stores of information would have been lost to us, if the writers of memoirs had shortened their labours by references to history. But this is one of the consequences of giving a work requiring patience, we may say drudgery, to a man of genius, who finds the dry task of detail irksome, and who rejoices in flying off to such matter as allows of his exhibiting more of himself, than of the man whose life he is recording. Still more inexcusable is the omission of the service which Sheridan rendered to the press, when an illiberal attempt was made by the benchers of Lincoln's Inn, to exclude newspaper-reporters from the bar. Not even a passing allusion is made to Sheridan's conduct on this occasion, though no circumstance of his life does greater honour to his memory. ficiencies like these certainly do little credit to our author's performance, for it is clear, that either his judgment or his information has been sadly at fault. De As for the character of Sheridan, with the impressions conveyed by this work of friendship fresh on our minds, we are reluctant to touch on it. It may be shortly summed up in the words, "he was an unsuccessful political adventurer," all his errors follow as necessary consequences of his condition. Had he taken the other, the profitable side, as it has turned out, contrary to Whig expectation, he might have left, together with a few debts, as respectable a reputation behind him, as did many of the sleek retainers of the "Heaven-born Minister." Place is the only safe port for loose principles, and many a crazy craft looks respectable, lying up in ordinary in that sweet harbour, that would make as bad a business of a long cruize with short provisions as poor Sheridan did. In We have now only to notice the literary merits of this work. Though, under existing circumstances, we never hoped for a valuable piece of Biography from Mr. Moore, we must own that we expected some trim pretty writing at his hands. this particular we have been disappointed. The composition of the book is generally loose, and often vicious; the style is poetic, we suppose we must call it, to a surfeiting degree. On a moderate calculation, there are 2,500 similes in the book, not to mention metaphors and figurative terms. The similes are as impertinent as they are frequent; no matter what the subject is, no matter whether there is room for them or not, they contrive to wedge themselves into the tail of a sentence by force of a dash, and introduced with the incessantly occurring like: we do conscientiously believe, that since the world began, there never was a book which had so many likenesses, and so few resemblances; in this respect, indeed, it beats the Somerset-house exhibition of portraits. We shall conclude by making a little bouquet of the flowers of Moore. P. 36. Miss Linley prefers Sheridan to her wealthier admirers. All that could be said about the matter was, that she was in love with a young gentleman; but our author thus contrives to sublimate this every-day 'occurrence :— "Like that saint Cecilia, by whose name she was always called, she had long welcomed to her soul a secret visitant,* whose gifts were of a higher and more radiant kind, than the more wealthy and lordly of this world can proffer." Our author should be more circumspect in his similes and explanatory notes. We read that Miss Linley welcomed to her soul a secret visitant, and are at that word referred to a note, which tells us that the youth found in her chamber had two crowns in his hand! P. 155. He makes a text of Buffon's saying, "Genius is Patience," or as another French writer has explained his * The youth found in her chamber, had in his hand two crowns or wreaths, the one of lilies the other of roses, which he had brought from Paradise!-Legend of St. Cecilia, YOL. IV.-W. R. 2 E thought, "La Patience cherche, et le Génie trouve." The thought is good, and pointedly expressed; but Mr. Moore cannot let the matter rest here; he, accordingly, sends Genius and Patience fishing for pearls; Patience goes to the bottom to search for the pearl, and Genius dives and brings it up. This idea would have been charming set to verse and music in the Melodies. We P. 186. He thus moralises, by figure, on the characters of Charles and Joseph Surface, the profligate and the hypocrite. "The levities and the errors of the one, arising from warmth of heart and of youth, may be merely like those mists that exhale from summer streams, obscuring them awhile to the eye, without affecting the native purity of their waters; while the hypocrisy of the other is like the mirage of the desert, shining with promise on the surface, but all false and barren beneath." have seldom seen a more judicious "may be" than that in the first branch of the simile; errors may be like mists, or they may not be, it is just as it happens. It is pleasant to see how satisfactorily points of morals are argued thus by figure. Make the profligate a stream and all goes well with him-warmth of heart-evaporation-mist-purity of element, are then things of course. Make the hypocrite a desert, and you can do what you please with him-his vice is like the mirage, shining with promise on the surface, but all false beneath-this by the way is false figure, for the falsehood is in the mirage, not in the thing beneath it, the sand is not false but the appearance that masks it. P. 220. "Such were the arguments by which he affected to support his cause, and it is not difficult to see the eyes of the snake glistening from under them." We have met with nothing like this since the simile of the Irish barrister—“ there he stood, gentlemen of the jury, with his hand in his breechespocket, like a crocodile." The eyes of snakes may glisten under many conceivable things; but, by no force of imagination can we fancy them glistening under arguments. P. 333. Some reflections on the slow progress of the obvious truths of political economy, are are poetically interrupted as follows: "Thus, frequently does Truth, before the drowsy world is prepared for her, like "The new morn on the Indian steep, Such puerile trifling is insufferable. دو P. 372. Our poet speaks edifyingly of wandering “after Sense into that region of Metaphor where, too often, like Angelica in the enchanted palace of Atlante, she is sought for in vain." This is too true, and our author very whimsically exemplifies the vice he reprehends. Why is a thing sought for and not to be found, like Angelica in the palace of Atlante? If a simile was necessary to illustrate a truth as bald as time, why might not a more generally intelligible one have served the purpose a needle in a bottle of hay, or a knee-buckle in the highlands, would have conveyed the idea as well as Angelica in the palace of Atlante. P. 440. Decayed jests like dried snakes: "Time having removed their venom, and with it, in a great degree, their wit, they are now, like dried snakes, mere harmless objects of curiosity." 66 P. 598. A chapter on the state of parties opens thus:During the short interval of peace, into which the country was now lulled-like a ship becalmed for a moment in the valley between two vast waves-such a change took place," &c. P. 669. Creditors excited, from the torpidity of despair, by the hope of payment, like adders drawn forth by the sun. "The mere likelihood of a sum of money being placed at his disposal was sufficient-like the bright day that brings forth the adder'-to call into life the activity of all his duns.”—The vipers ! SO But we sicken of these sweets, which are indeed abundantly scattered through the book as to render particular citations unnecessary. No one can open a page of the volume without seeing some three or four examples of the kind we have quoted; indeed our author seems to have thrown all the loose chips of his poetic workshop into the life of Sheridan. Curran used to say, we are told, that when he could not speak sense, he spoke metaphor; whether this has been Mr. Moore's plan of composition we shall not venture to decide. looseness of the style is often quite as annoying as its unprovoked beauties. The reader is frequently utterly at a loss to understand who speaks, or who or what is referred to. But this ought not to surprise us, for nothing is more common than the association of finery and slovenliness. The ART. VII.-Memoirs of Samuel Pepys, Esq. F.R. S. Secretary to the Admiralty, in the reigns of Charles II. and James II.; comprising his Diary from 1659 to 1669, deciphered by the Rev. John Smith, A. B. of St John's College, Cambridge, from the original Short-hand MS. in the Pepysian Library; and a Selection from his Private Correspondence. Edited by Richard, Lord Braybrooke. In two volumes. London. Henry Colburn. 4to. pp. 1139. Price six guineas. THE Diary of Mr. Pepys is the most curious of those MS. memorials of old times, which the inquisitive spirit of the present age has raked up from the dust of neglected libraries. We are not told to what circumstances we are indebted for its publication, at this particular period, after so long an interval of repose. Perhaps we owe it to the fortunate escape of Mr. Evelyn's Memoirs from the scissors, and to the celebrity which that amusing piece of autobiography has acquired. The history of the MS. is told in the title page. Mr. Pepys left behind him no children, to whom this record of a part of his life would have been interesting-a source, apparently, of regret, for he observes, in one part of the Diary, that "it is a sad consideration how the Pepyses decay, and nobody almost that I know in a present way of increasing them." Our family," however, he ingenuously confesses, "were never very considerable." The MS. therefore he bequeathed, along with the rest of his library, to Magdalen College, Cambridge, of which he had been a member; so that, instead of remaining in a pigeon-hole of some antiquated family cabinet, it has had the honour of slumbering on a shelf in the Bibliotheca Pepysiana, so named, we suppose, in honour of the testator. One of Alma Mater's more laborious children, to whose patient industry the reader must consider himself as principally indebted for whatever instruction or delight he may reap from a perusal of these volumes, was employed in the painful, though not unpleasant task, of deciphering the MS.; and the head of a noble family, or, more properly speaking, the possessor of a splendid mansion, by virtue of which he enjoys authority in the College in question, took upon himself the more honourable, but less irksome, duty of editor. The London press has performed its part with its usual disregard of economy; and the Diary now appears before the world in a shape in which the writer would have some difficulty in recognizing his own production. It is to be wished that Mr. Pepys could have a sight of the monumental tomes, in which an age, remote from his own, has |