and its inspiration shall be manifest to your cost on the first of the month. As specimens of his manner in "cutting up," we need but allude to his reviews of Atherstone's Fall of Nineveh, Stokes's Lay of the Desert, Leigh Hunt's Byron and his Contemporaries, The Age, Michell's Living Poets, The Man of Ton, &c, &c. But after all, and his victims knew it, his bark was worse than his bite; at least there was no venom in his tooth; his abuse was hearty—his denunciation was vehement—his Billingsgate was pitched altissimo—but he bore no malice or hatred in his heart, and anon would squeeze your hand as crushingly as he had just squeezed your throat.
᾽Αλλ᾽ ἦλθε μὲν δὴ τοῠτο τὂυνειδος τάχ᾽ ἂν
᾽Οργῇ βιασθὲ νμᾰλλον ἢ γνώμῃ φρενων.
Being in a rage with you at the moment, he would bate no jot of whatever bad thing he could bring against you. Il avait le don de la parole, et ce qui se jouait et se peignait dans son esprit ne faisait qu'un bond sur le papier. But he is no longer remembered by his lampoons and philippics; and the leader of the Whigs set a gracious and graceful example when he ignored the heated Tory partisan, and gave the poet and critic a pension. In the thirty-sixth of the Noctes, North declared, "In the present state of this country—I don't mean to disguise my sentiments—the man who condescends to pocket either pension or sinecure, unless he has earned them by public service, and moreover can't live without the money, that man, be he high or low, deserves to bear any name but that of Tory; for that, sir, is only a synonym for Patriot—and Patriot, if I have any skill in such affairs, means Honest Man." That was in 1828, when as yet the Whigs were not in. It is pleasant to think that in 1851, when the Whigs were in, the "old man eloquent" was put on the pension list. And it was pleasant in 1852 to see him, though alas! at some physical cost (indeed they say it was virtually his last appearance in public), make his way to the Edinburgh polling-booths, from his invalid's retirement at Dalkeith, to vote for so thorough-paced a Whig, and erst so hotly-vituperated an opponent, as Thomas Babington Macaulay.
Give him, on the other hand, a book to review which he really liked, and with what warmth would he greet it, with what felicity interpret its merits! There are criticisms from his pen hardly to be surpassed in our literature—so richly stored are they with original thought, lofty imagination, subtle insight, humorous illustration, generous sympathy, and imposing diction. Wordsworth found in him an expositor genial and courageous, in the midst of a faithless generation. Admirably has he commented on Byron—on Moore—on Burns. In passages innumerable, sometimes fragmentary, and sometimes in prolonged detail, he has discussed as only genius can the powers of Shakspeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Thomson, Collins, Cowper, Southey, Coleridge, Crabbe, Heber, Montgomery (James and Robert both), Bowles, Elliott, Motherwell. His readings in Spenser—a long series—enticed many to read, who had contented themselves with panegyrising, the Bard of Mulla. His vivacious essays on Homer were followed with keen enjoyment by old Masters of Arts and young misses in their teens. So were the expositions of the Greek Drama, of Hesiod, &c. And what shall be said of the Noctes
