from the cruel, bigotted, ruthless policy of the olden world ; and whei^ his long career was closed by that awful event to which piety brings no indefinite delay, the unanimous feeling of her grateful people might have been expressed in the words of Cicero, "Luctuosum hoc suis; acerbum patriæ; grave bonis omnibus."
It is, however, rather as a man of letters, that Earl Russell claims attention as a member of our "Gallery;" in which character, if space were at my command, I might consider his pretensions as an essayist, a tragedian, a novelist, an historian, a biographer, an editor, a writer on constitutional history, and a political pamphleteer. Sydney Smith it was who said of him that he was "ready to undertake anything and everything,—to build St. Paul's,—cut for the stone,—or command the Channel fleet;" and this pretentious ambition seems to have led him into every walk of literature. One of his earliest publications was a slim octavo volume, entitled Essays and Sketches of Life and Character, 1820. To these words was added the statement that the various pieces were published from the MS. of "a gentleman who had left his lodgings;" and the volume was prefaced by a narrative, signed "Joseph Skillett," the lodging-house keeper, who is supposed to publish the papers to pay himself the rent which his lodger had forgotten to liquidate. These bibliographical facts may be worth recording, as this preface was afterwards suppressed, and the book supplied with a new tide-page, on which the words "second edition," with the date 1821, appeared, with the addition of a dedication to "Thomas Moore, Esq., who advised the publication of the following fragments."
Next to this comes The Nun of Arrouca, a tale (Murray, 1822),—a tome which few of my readers have ever even heard of. It was rigidly suppressed by the author; is consequently very rare; and will fetch its two guineas any day.
Of his lordship's dramatic lucubrations, which were pronounced dead and buried sixty years ago, silence may be held on the principle de mortuis nil nisi bonum. The best known is Don Carlos, which is now as completely forgotten as Otway's play under the same title. Yet this latter in its day had met with unbounded applause, while the admirable Orphan, and the still nobler Venice Preserved, had received but a moderate share of public approbation. This error of contemporary judgment is ridiculed by the Duke of Buckingham in his well-known Session of the Poets,—an imitation of a satire of Boileau:—
"Tom Otway came next, Tom Shadwell's dear Zany,
Who swears, for heroicks, he writes best of any;
Don Carlos his pockets so amply had filled,
That his mange was quite cur'd, and his lice were all kill'd,"
—which may serve as a specimen of the refined criticism of the day.[1]
But to return from my short excursus. Of the labours of Lord John Russell in other departments of literature, I cannot now speak. The student may gain something from his Essay on the British Constitution; but his History of Europe since the Peace of Utrecht will hardly, I fancy, repay the trouble of exhumation. As a biographer, in his Life and Letters of Thomas Moore he has provoked an inodorous comparison with Boswell and Lockhart. He was ever distinguished by his love and
- ↑ Works of Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, ii. 151.
