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returned to his former occupation of newspaper essayist, and commenced, in 1752, The Covent Garden Journal. In this paper he published some of his most agreeable essays. His style in these has the cosiness and abandonment of an after-dinner chat, and is peculiarly felicitous in gossiping comments on literature and manners. In this journal he was drawn into a verbal quarrel with Smollett, who had established a fame, by Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle, second only to his own. The Journal was discontinued on account of Fielding's health, which now suffered from a complication of diseases, of which the principal were asthma, dropsy, and jaundice. The physicians recommended a milder climate as the only means of preserving his life, and Lisbon was fixed upon for his residence. Before he went, however, he undertook, at the request of the Duke of Newcastle, and for a fee of six hundred pounds, to extirpate some gangs of robbers and murderers who infested the metropolis. After performing this duty with great sagacity and complete success, he prepared for his voyage. On the 26th of June, 1754, he took that melancholy leave of his children which he has described with such affectionate pathos in his Voyage to Lisbon. This, his latest work, cut short by death, indicates that his mind was bright and his spirits joyous to the very verge of the tomb. He died at Lisbon, in the beginning of October, 1754, in the forty-eighth year of his age. His family, consisting of a wife and four children, were left penniless, but were preserved from want by the kindness of Sir John Fielding, and the ever-active charity of Ralph Allen.

It would seem that the most rigid moralist, in reviewing the events of a life illustrated by virtues so imperfectly rewarded, and by vices so severely expiated, as

that of Fielding, would be inclined rather to regret his misfortunes than harshly to condemn his faults. His whole existence, from the age of twenty, was one long struggle with fortune, in which he bore humiliations and experienced distresses which would have crushed a more sensitive spirit at the outset. His life, judged by its external events, without taking into account the character of the man, appears as wretched as any chronicled in the calamities of genius. But it was the peculiar constitution of his nature, that those qualities which whirled him into excesses blunted the edge of the miseries into which his excesses plunged him. In his lowest state, he rarely desponded, rarely lost the vigor of his intellect and the gladness of his disposition. Lady Montague, writing soon after she heard of his death, says that "his happy constitution (even when he had with great pains half demolished it) made him forget every evil, when he was before a venison pasty or over a flask of champagne; and I am persuaded," she adds, "he knew more happy moments than any prince upon earth. His natural spirits gave him rapture with a cook-maid, and cheerfulness when he was starving in a garret." As a consequence of this felicity of disposition, he never whined about his misfortunes, never scolded the public for neglecting him, never represented his sensualities and weaknesses as the result of his ardent genius. From all nauseous cant of this kind, which so commonly infects authors and their biographers, Fielding's sense of humor would have preserved him, even if he had not been saved from it by his sense of the pleasurable. And that much abused noun of multitude, the World, against whose injustice poets have ever stormily inveighed, may find two consolations, at least, for its comparative neglect

of Fielding; in the thought that it could not possibly have lavished upon him an amount of wealth which his improvidence would not instantly have wasted; and in the reflection that, but for his poverty, he never would have produced those exquisite creations of humor and imagination, with their large knowledge of human nature and their large toleration of human infirmity, which have made his name immortal.

DANA'S POEMS AND PROSE WRITINGS.*

THIS Collection of the writings of one of our deepest and most suggestive thinkers ought to have been made before, although, from the preface, we should judge that the author had undertaken a somewhat unwilling duty in making it even now. It contains all of Mr. Dana's poems and prose writings formerly published, together with a large addition, in the shape of reviews and essays originally contributed to various periodicals, and now for the first time collected. The matter in the second vol

ume will be new to most readers who are familiar with The Buccaneer and The Idle Man, it being wholly composed of articles reprinted from the North American Review, the Spirit of the Pilgrims, and a few other sources. The volumes will undoubtedly take a prominent place in American literature, among the best mental productions of the country; and our object in the present article is, to give a hasty view of the qualities of mind and disposition they display, and the peculiar individuality pervading the whole. We would not do Mr. Dana the injustice to judge his writings by any less exacting principles than those which apply to the higher class of minds.

Poems and Prose Writings. By Richard Henry Dana. New York: Baker and Scribner. 1850. 2 vols. 12mo. pp. 443, 440.- Christian Er. aminer, March, 1850.

In Mr. Dana's nature there is evidently no divorce between literature and life, and he belongs to a class of authors widely different from those who follow letters as a profession, as a trade, as a means of amusing others or displaying themselves. His writings carry with them the evidence of being the genuine products of his own thinking and living, and are full of those magical signs which indicate patient meditation and a nature rooted in the realities of things. From his prevailing seriousness, everything, too, has a meaning and purpose, and bears directly on the conduct of life; and there are passages of a certain still and deep intensity which seem forced from a mind eloquent from restrained agony, and expressive at the expense of impairing its vitality. The objects of thought seem to press so closely upon his heart and brain, that he cannot remove them to that safe distance which admits of their being cheerily contemplated; and he therefore has little of that free swing and felicitous audacity of manner, natural to thinkers in whom subject and object are in genial companionship. The general impression which his works leave on the mind is the combination of earnestness and conscientiousness in the spirit of the author, an earnestness which, in spite of his clear-seeing and quick-shaping imagination, is apt to become didactic when it might be representative, and a conscientiousness which has a nervous and morbid, as well as a muscular and healthy

movement.

There is, indeed, in Mr. Dana's nature a singular disagreement between faculty and disposition. His intellect has an instinctive tendency to objects; is clear, sure, and bright, in its vision; endowed with the discerning power of the observer and the divining power of the

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