commercial enterprise, from its projection to its failure; sometimes tedious, but not without moving accidents by flood and field. "Abbotsford and Newstead" is a delightful specimen of biographical-topographical gossip: the former part making up one of the most charming chapters in "Lockhart's Life of Scott;" which is giving it unstinted praise, yet praise as discreet as emphatical. "Captain Bonneville" is a kind of sequel to "Astoria," relating the expedition of a chieftain of trappers and hunters among the Rocky Mountains of the Far West. But the supply of this sort of information concerning bark canoes and wigwams, Indian swamps and Indian scamps, snowy mountains and sun-scorched prairies, beaver-skins and buffalo meat, salt weed and cotton-wood bark, was by this time beginning to exceed the demand, and the excitement kindled by Cooper's romances was becoming subject to the law of reaction. Hence these works fell comparatively flat on the public ear, and the public voice was heard to murmur that Geoffrey Crayon had written himself dry, and that his every later literary birth was a still birth—a sleep and a forgetting.
For awhile he was silent. When again his voice was heard, it was heard gladly, and the echo of response was still fraught with the music of popularity, and swelled with resonance of welcome. "Oliver Goldsmith: a Biography," was a theme a little the worse for wear; but an English public was too fond of both Geoffrey Crayon and him "for shortness called Noll,"
Who wrote like an angel, and talked like poor Poll,
not to lend a willing ear to what the one had to say of the other. Prior's life was voted a pattern of industry, but left unread. Forster's was highly, widely, and deservedly admired, and remains the Life—being executed, as Mr. Irving himself testifies, with a spirit, a feeling, a grace, and an eloquence, that leave nothing to be desired. That Mr. Irving's biography made its appearance at all, when by its own averment it was no desideratum, is explained by the fact that its author had already published it in a meagre and fragmentary form, which attracted slight notice; and now, in the course of revising and republishing his opera omnia, felt called upon to reproduce it in a more complete and satisfactory shape. He writes con amore, and with ever-prompt indulgence, of one to whose literary genius his own is indebted and akin. Whereas Johnson said of poor Goldsmith, "Let not his frailties be remembered: he was a very great man,"—it is Mr. Irving's course to say, let them rather be remembered, since their tendency is to endear; since he was no man's enemy but his own; since his errors, in the main, inflicted evil on none but himself, and were so blended with humorous and touching circumstances as to disarm anger and conciliate kindness; since there is something in the harmless infirmities of a good and great, but erring creature, that pleads affectingly to our common nature—as being ourselves also in the body, ὡς και ἀυτοι ὀντες ἐν σωματι. Prudish censors may scout this sort of indulgence on the part of a critical biographer. For ourselves, we have too much fellow-feeling with Elia's veneration for an honest obliquity of mind, to find the indulgence culpable; thinking with Elia, that the more laughable blunders a man shall commit in your company, the more tests he giveth you that he will not bewray or overreach you. "I love the safety," protests dear,
