harshly. The unfortunate author seemed unaware of the failure of his powers, among which, invention, at the least, was active to the last. Novels, tales, magazine contributions, and his immethodic autobiographies, remain to attest to the manly courage with which he battled against adverse fate in his latter days. Macaulay could not have thought much of his literary style if, as alleged, when wishing to characterize something especially vile, he said that it "reminded him of Galt when writing his finest;" and Moore has embalmed some of the choicest specimens of his diction in his lines entitled, "Alarming Intelligence!—Revolution in the Dictionary!!—One Galt at the head of it!!!"—
"God preserve us! There's nothing now safe from assault;
Thrones toppling around,—churches brought to the hammer;
And accounts have just reach'd us that one Mr. Galt
Has declared open war against English and Grammar!"[1]
VIII.— WILLIAM MAGINN, "THE DOCTOR."
"Beat Bentley, if you can, but omit the brutality; rival Parr, eschewing all pomposity; outlinguist old Magliabechi, and yet be a man of the world; emulate Swift in satire, but suffer not one squeeze of his sæva indignatio to eat your own heart. Be and do all this, and the 'Doctor' will no longer be a unique. Long may he continue at once the star of our erudition, our philosophy and our dialectics, and in his own immortal words,—
"'A randy, bandy, brandy, no Dandy,
Rollicking jig of an Irishman!'"
So far, the brilliant schizzo in Fraser for which, the Doctor's native modesty not allowing to exhibit himself, the pen of his ever constant friend, J. G. Lockhart, was called into requisition. Jubilant in prospect, sad in retrospect,—for it is sad to think that the renowned "standard-bearer,"—a giant in literature,—an erratic genius. Protean in intellect as in appellation,—an ἀνὴρ μυριανοῦς,—should, in his own miserable case, serve to point to the old, old moral,—one of the most melancholy, because the most striking, instances in the history of letters,—of the utter absence, amid all his splendid endowments, of that
"Prudent, cautious self-control,"
which another unfortunate son of genius has told us, as the lesson of his own bitter experience,
"Is wisdom's root."[2]
"Few men," says S. C. Hall, whose acquaintance with Maginn went back to the days when the latter was a schoolmaster in Cork, "ever started with better prospects; there was hardly any position in the state to which he might not have aspired. His learning was profound; his wit of the tongue and the pen ready, pointed, caustic and brilliant; his essays, tales, poems, scholastic disquisitions,—in short his writings upon all conceivable topics were of the very highest order.… His acquaintances,
- ↑ Moore's Poetical Works, Longmans, 1854, vol. ix. p. 48.
- ↑ Burns.
