success either to the ingenuity of its suggestions, or to the graces of its style; and that as, in after-life the prize essayist was never distinguished for felicity of expression or fertility of illustration, and acquired a style not only destitute of ornament, hut unwieldy and ponderous; this youthful success suggests the question, "Whether, in devoting all his powers to the study of the law, he crushed the faculty of graceful composition with so violent an effort, that Nature, in revenge, made his ear dull to the music of language, and involved, though she did not darken, his wisest words?" Happily no such quære affects the career of the author of "Ion." He, indeed, is not Lord High Chancellor; which makes a difference. But neither did the great Eldon write a triumphant tragedy; and that again makes a difference in the Puisne Judge's favour. Fancy Lord Eldon editing the Reliques of Elia, or measuring Macready for blank verse; and if that is not extravagant enough, then fancy yourself reading the one, or squeezing into the pit to see the other.
Sir Thomas was not far gone in his teens when he woo'd and won publicity, it is said, by a "poem" on the liberation of Sir Francis Burdett from durance vile. While still a schoolboy at Reading, he published a volume of "poems," including a sacred drama on the "Offering of Isaac" (inspired by that admiration of Mistress Hannah More, of which lingering traces survive in the preface to "Ion"), "An Indian Tale," and some verses about the Education of the Poor, suggested by a visit to Reading of Joseph Lancaster. School-days over, he came to London, and fagged under the famous Chitty, in whose Criminal Law he aided and abetted. Then we find him fertile in the production of pamphlets, on toleration, on penal institutions, &c., and taking a gallant stand on the side of Wordsworth, at a time (1815) when to do so was to be in a scouted and flouted minority. Anon he is on the list of contributors to the periodical literature of the day—to the Retrospective Review, the Encyclopædia Metropoltiana, and the London Magazine. This kind of work he engaged in for love and money. Himself is our authority for making lucre a part of his motive: for when old Godwin toddled into the young advocate's chambers, the very morning after an introduction at Charles Lamb's, and then and there "carelessly observed that he had a little bill for 150l. falling due on the morrow, which he had forgotten till that morning, and desired the loan of the necessary amount for a few weeks,"—the flattered and regretful Talfourd "was obliged, with much confusion," he tells us, "to assure my distinguished visitor how glad I should have been to serve him, but that I was only just starting as a special pleader, was obliged to write for magazines to help me on, and had not such a sum in the world."[1] The articles contributed to the Encyclopædia are the most notable of his labours at this period, and well deserved their recent republication in a compact, collected form.[2] Foremost among these is his history of Greek Literature. Here he contrives to press a large amount of information into very narrow limits—as they seem, at least, when compared with those defined for himself, on the same classical ground, by Colonel Mure. We are told all that is known, and of course a trifle more, about such early birds as Linus—
