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the narrowed twinkling eyes, and the echoing jaws, of living laughter.

In the third lecture, Mr. H. converses about Cowley, Butler, Suckling, and Etherege: best about Butler.

The fourth lecture opens happily :

Comedy is a "graceful ornament to the civil order; the Corinthian capital of polished society." Like the mirrors which have been added to the sides of one of our theatres, it reflects the images of grace, of gaiety, and pleasure double, and completes the perspective of human life. To read a good comedy is to keep the best company in the world, where the best things are said, and the most amusing happen. The wittiest remarks are always ready on the tongue, and the luckiest occasions are always at hand to give birth to the happiest conceptions. Sense makes strange havoc of nonsense. Refinement acts as a foil to affectation, and affectation to ignorance. Sentence after sentence tells. We don't know which to admire most, the observation, or the answer to it. We would give our fingers to be able to talk so ourselves, or to hear others talk so. In turning over the pages of the best comedies, we are almost transported to another world, and escape from this dull age to one that was all life, and whim, and mirth, and humour. The curtain rises, and a gayer scene presents itself, as on the canvass of Watteau. We are admitted behind the scenes like spectators at court, on a levee or birth-day; but it is the court, the gala day of wit and pleasure, of gallantry and Charles II.! What an air breathes from the name! what a rustling of silks and waving of plumes! what a sparkling of diamond ear-rings and shoe-buckles! What bright eyes, (ah, those were Waller's Sacharissa's as she passed!) what killing looks and graceful motions! How the faces of the whole ring are dressed in smiles! how the repartee goes round! how wit and folly, elegance and awkward imitation of it, set one another off! Happy, thoughtless age, when kings and nobles led purely ornamental lives; when the utmost stretch of a morning's study went no farther than the choice of a sword-knot, or the adjustment of a side-curl; when the soul spoke out in all the pleasing eloquence of dress; and beaux and belles, enamoured of themselves in one another's follies, fluttered like gilded butterflies, in giddy mazes, through the walks of St. James's Park !'

Congreve, Wycherley, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar are successively and discriminatingly characterized. Congreve was indebted to Marivaux for that incessant activity of style which, like a whirling whetstone, sparkles at every touch, and sets an edge on every thought. The attack on Jeremy Collier, which concludes this section, deserves perusal :

We may date the decline of English comedy from the time of Farquhar. For this several causes might be assigned in the political and moral changes of the times; but among other minor ones, Jeremy Collier, in his View of the English Stage, frightened

the

the poets, and did all he could to spoil the stage, by pretending to reform it; that is, by making it an echo of the pulpit, instead of a reflection of the manners of the world. He complains bitterly of the profaneness of the stage; and is for fining the actors for every oath they utter, to put an end to the practice; as if common swearing had been an invention of the poets and stageplayers. He cannot endure that the fine gentlemen drink, and the fine ladies intrigue, in the scenes of Congreve and Wycherley, when things so contrary to law and Gospel happened nowhere else. He is vehement against duelling, as a barbarous custom, of which the example is suffered with impunity nowhere but on the stage. He is shocked at the number of fortunes that are irreparably ruined by the vice of gaming on the boards of the theatres. He seems to think that every breach of the Ten Commandments begins and ends there. He complains that the tame husbands of his time are laughed at on the stage, and that the successful gallants triumph, which was without precedent either in the city or the court. He does not think it enough that the stage" shews vice its own image, scorn its own feature," unless they are damned at the same instant, and carried off (like Don Juan) by real devils to the infernal regions, before the faces of the spectators. It seems that the author would have been contented to be present at a comedy or a farce, like a Father Inquisitor, if there was to be an auto da fé at the end, to burn both the actors and the poet. This sour, nonjuring critic has a great horror and repugnance at poor human nature, in nearly all its shapes; of the existence of which he appears only to be aware through the stage and this he considers as the only exception to the practice of piety, and the performance of the whole duty of man; and seems fully convinced, that if this nuisance were abated, the whole world would be regulated according to the creed and the catechism. This is a strange blindness and infatuation! He forgets, in his overheated zeal, two things: First, That the stage must be copied from real life, that the manners represented there must exist elsewhere, and "denote a foregone conclusion," to satisfy common sense. Secondly, That the stage cannot shock common decency, according to the notions that prevail of it in any age or country, because the exhibition is public. If the pulpit, for instance, had banished all vice and imperfection from the world, as our critic would suppose, we should not have seen the offensive reflection of them on the stage, which he resents as an affront to the cloth, and an outrage on religion.'

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Lecture V., on the Periodical Essayists, is introduced by a lively portrait of Montaigne. The Tatler is preferred to The Spectator; and The Rambler is depreciated, in fine language. The sixth lecture treats of English Novelists. Another excursion, concerning Don Quixote, precedes the criticism on Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, and Sterne. An English feeling, a nativeness of manner, pervades all the literature of

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the age of George II.; which Mr. Hazlitt justly, we think, ascribes to the circumstance that the government reposed on the popularity of the country, instead of attempting to dictate

to it.

The seventh lecture surveys Hogarth, and evolves the theory of comic painting; and the eighth rapidly sketches the newest writers of comedy, Colman, Murphy, Foote, and Sheridan.

All these volumes will be read with luxury on account of their brilliant execution, and with instruction on account of the many delicate remarks which are interspersed among the declamation. Some returns to exhausted topics and some, disproportion of parts may afford ground of complaint; and perhaps the style is too uniformly aromatic, every where flowery with metaphor and redolent of allusion.

Two other volumes of Lectures by Mr. Hazlitt yet remain for notice, on the writers of the Age of Elizabeth, and on the Politics of our own Times.

ART. X. The African Committee.

By T. E. Bowdich, Esq. Conductor of the Mission to Ashantee. 8vo. pp. 81. 3s. Longman and Co. 1819.

FOR

OR nearly the last fifty years, the philanthropy of England has been directed towards the continent of Africa; and some of the wisest and best of men, whom this period has produced, have benevolently devoted their wealth and their intelligence to the establishment of a commercial and friendly intercourse between Europe and that quarter of the globe: judiciously anticipating that this would be the means of diffusing happiness and civilization throughout a large portion of the human species, long consigned to ignorance, barbarism, and suffering. Men of different political sentiments have abstracted their minds from all party-bias and the maddening contests of life, zealously to unite in this great and disinterested work of charity and benevolence; and they have influenced the Government to forward their views, by allotting to the object a considerable portion of the public revenue. About 70,000l. are annually voted for the purpose of promoting our intercourse with the black population, and of this sum 28,000l. are placed at the disposal of "The Committee of the Company of Merchants trading to Africa." Whether it be judicious in Government to intrust to a company of mercantile delegates the expenditure of a sum intended purely for the promotion of science and humanity,

may

may be foreign to the objects of our present inquiry: but in every point of view it behoves us to investigate whether the sentiments entertained by Government are really aided by this committee or not.

It would form a lamentable blot in the chart of human character, and cast the shroud of apathy over enthusiastic and prospective benevolence, if it were found that, in a case in which men have laid aside all worldly differences, and have united to promote a grand and favourite scheme of meliorating the condition of the human race, their intentions had been frustrated, or retarded, by the indirect intrusion of petty views of personal interest and individual vanity: which, alas! so often blight the hopes of the moral votary, and render the schemes of the philanthropist a mere fairy vision or Utopian dream.

This subject was brought very much into our minds by a work lately published, under the title of A Mission to Ashantee, in 1817, written by Mr. Bowdich, the gentleman who conducted the expedition, and who happily directed his embassy to a fortunate termination; triumphing over obstacles which were justly pronounced by his superiors to be little less than insurmountable, and which were similar to those that have hitherto baffled all the efforts of Europeans to penetrate into the interior of the country. Of this production we made an ample report in our Numbers for November and December last; and we considered it as one of the most useful and luminous additions which had been made in late years to our knowlege on the subject. We could not, therefore, but form a favourable opinion of Mr. Bowdich's talents, when we reflected that, after the numerous abortive attempts of various able and persevering men to establish an intercourse with the inland country, this gentleman, in the short space of two months, so completely attained the object that we have now a permanent accredited agent at Coomassie, the capital of a great and powerful kingdom, which but ten years ago was known to us only by vague and improbable reports.

We have now to notice, and more at large than we at first intended, a subsequent publication by Mr. B., to which we alluded at the close of our former article; and in which he introduces his readers into all the arcana of the African Committee-room. We have no knowlege of these secrets but from his exposition of them, and in repeating it we can in no degree be pledged for its accuracy: but we have purposely allowed some months to pass since the appearance of his pamphlet, and no contradiction of its statements has reached our hands.

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It must be remarked that the African service is of so forlorn a nature, that it is almost impossible to induce respectable and educated persons to accept of the inferior situations on the Company's establishment. When, therefore, chance had thrown into their employ a young man of not merely useful but superior talents, we should have thought that both justice and sound policy would have prompted the Committee to conciliate such an agent, and use every means to attach him to their service. It is consequently with great regret for both individual and public disappointment, that we peruse Mr. Bowdich's narrative of the conduct which has been adopted towards him by this mercantile body. We learn that in the year 1814 he obtained a promise of an appointment on the Company's establishment, the Committee stating the usual plan of fair rotation in filling up the vacancies: but the applicant found, even in this service, a considerable degree of that manoeuvring by which people in higher departments are said to enable their friends to over-reach the friendless. When we reflect on the anxious state of hope and fear sustained by young men who, on their entrance into life, are soliciting public employment, as well as by their relatives; and when we consider that, while they are kept depending on promises of total insincerity or of deferred execution, opportunities of engaging in other pursuits are perhaps irrevocably lost; we shall be led to pronounce that few things are more unprincipled and unfeeling than this polished insincerity, which is so commonly practised towards those who are candidates for such situations. Another instance shortly occurred to shew that the indulgences of this Committee were not regulated on those general and extensive principles of impartiality, which ought to guide public bodies in bestowing favours on their servants; Mr. Bowdich being refused the privilege of taking his wife with him to the settlement, while the Committee granted this permission to a junior officer, the companion of his voyage. It is this aberration from general and abstract principles, this substitution of favouritism for justice, which poisons life and is the bane of every service. Thus disgusted, Mr. B. returned from Africa after a residence of only about seven months. On his arrival in England, the Committee applied to him both for information and for his opinions on the subject of making the munitions of war the means of trading with the negro states; and they subsequently expressed their strong approbation of the intelligence which he supplied on the question, and which went to form the data of an official report from the Committee to the Privy Council. After so high a testimony to the abilities of a per

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