and fondly lingers among the brief triumphs of Moskwa on the verge of the terrible catastrophe! The narrative of that disastrous expedition is, indeed, written with a master's hand; we see the "Grand Army" marching to its destruction through the immense perspective; the wild hordes flying before the terror of its "coming;" the barbaric magnificence of Moscow towering in the far distance; and when we gaze upon the sacrificial conflagration of the Kremlin, we feel that it is the funeral pile of the conqueror's glories. It is well for the readers of this splendid work, that there is more in it of the painter than of the metaphysician; that its style glows with the fervour of battle, or stiffens with the spoils of victory; yet we wonder that this monument to imperial grandeur should be raised from the dead level of jacobinism by an honest and profound thinker. The solution is, that although he was this, he was also morethat, in opinion, he was devoted to the cause of the people; but that, in feeling, he required some individual object of worship; that he selected Napoleon as one in whose origin and career he might impersonate his principles and gratify his affections; and that he adhered to his own idea with heroic obstinacy when the "child and champion of the republic" openly sought to

repress all feeling and thought, but such as he could cast in his own iron moulds, and scoffed at popular enthusiasm even while it bore him to the accomplishment of his loftiest desires.

If the experiences and the sympathies which acted so powerfully on the mind of Hazlitt, detract somewhat from his authority as a reasoner, they give an unprecedented interest and value to his essays on character and books. The ex

cellence of these works differ not so much in degree as in kind from that of all others of their class. There is a weight and substance about them, which makes us feel that amidst all their nice and dexterous analysis, they are, in no small measure, creations. The quantity of thought which is accumulated upon his favourite subjects; the variety and richness of the illustrations; and the strong sense of beauty and pleasure which pervades and animates the composition, give them a place, if not above, yet apart from the writings of all other essayists. They have not, indeed, the dramatic charm of the old Spectator' and 'Tatler,' nor the airy touch with which Addison and Steele skimmed along the surface of many-coloured life; but they disclose the subtle essences of character, and trace the secret springs of the affections with a more learned and penetrating spirit of

human dealing than either. The intense interest which he takes in his theme, and which prompts him to adorn it lavishly with the spoils of many an intellectual struggle, commends it to the feelings as well as the understanding, and makes the thread of his argument seem to us like a fibre of our own moral being. Thus his essay on Pedantry,' seems, within its few pages, to condense not only all that can be said, but all that can be felt, on the happiness which we derive from the force of habit, on the softening influences of blameless vanity, and on the moral and picturesque effect of those peculiarities of manner, arising from professional associations, which diversify and emboss the plain groundwork of modern life. Thus, his character of Rousseau is not merely a just estimate of the extraordinary person to whom it relates, but is so imbued with the predominant feeling of his works that they seem to glide in review before us, and we rise from the essayist as if we had perused the Confessions' anew with him, and had partaken in the strong sympathy which they excited within him during the happiest summers of his youth. Thus, his paper on 'Actors and Acting,' breathes the very soul of abandonment to impulse and heedless enjoyment, affording glimpses of those brief triumphs

which make a stroller's career "less forlorn," and presenting mirrors to the stage in which its grand and affecting images, themselves reflected from nature, are yet further prolonged and multiplied. His individual portraits of friends and enemies are hit off with all the strength of hatred or affection, neither mitigated by courtesy nor mistrust-partial, as they embrace, at most, only one aspect of the character, but startling in their vividness, and productive of infinite amusement to those who are acquainted with the originals. It must be conceded that these personal references were sometimes made with unjustifiable freedom; but they were more rarely prompted by malice prepense, than by his strong consciousness of the eccentricities of mankind, which pressed upon him for expression, and irritated his pen into satiric picture. And when this keen observance was exerted on scenes in which he delighted-as the Wednesday evening parties of Mr Lamb's-how fine, how genial, how happy his delineations! How he gathers up the precious moments, when poets and artists known to fame, and men of fancy and wit yet unexhausted by publication, met in careless pleasure; and distils their finest essence. And if sometimes the temptation of making a spiteful hit at one of his friends was too urgent for re

sistance, what amends he made by some oblique compliment, at once as hearty and as refined as those by which Pope has made those whom he loved immortal. But these essays, in which the spirit of personality sometimes runs riot, are inferior, in our apprehension, to those in which it warms and peoples more abstracted views of humanity-not purely metaphysical reasonings, which it tended to disturb,* nor political disqui

Of the writers since Hume, who have written on metaphysics with the severity proper to the subject, are Mr Fearne, the author of the Essay on Consciousness,' and Lady Mary Shepherd, whose works on Cause and Effect' are amongst the most remarkable productions of the age. Beattie, Dugald Stewart, Dr Brown, and his imitators, turned what should have been abstract reasoning" to favour and to prettiness." Mr Hazlitt obscured it by thickly clustered associations; and Coleridge presented it in the masquerade of a gorgeous fancy. Lady Mary Shepherd, on the other hand, is a thinker of as much honesty as courage; her speculations are colourless, and leave nothing on the mind but the fine-drawn lines of thought. Coleridge, addressing the Duchess of Devonshire, on a spirited verse she had written on the heroism of Tell, asks

"O lady, nursed in pomp and pleasure,

Where got ye that heroic measure?'

The poet might have found in the reasonings of Lady Mary Shepherd a worthier object of admiration than in the little stanza which seemed so extraordinary an effort for a lady of fashion.