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GARRICK.

As an example of the good sense and proper feeling of Mathews, apart from his profession as an actor and his character as a humourist, it will be worth while to quote a part of one of his letters respecting Garrick. He is defending him against the imputation of having been a mere money-maker and parsimonious. " So much," says he, " for contemporary biography. Davies, Murphy, and others, have all endeavoured, but with affected candour in their statements, to leave an impression of his meanness, vanity, and various other despicable qualities. Here (in the Garrick correspondence) we have evidence clear as the noon-day sun to the contrary. And observe the comments on the character of his future biographers (or libellers) from the great and good. I allude to the various observations on Murphy and Davies, two wretched actors, whose vanity induced them to believe that Garrick alone prevented their success. Yet even those men, while he was alive, repeatedly add their testimony to the universal admiration which he excited. Look at the repentance of those who quarrelled with him; observe the death-bed recantation of proud Mossop, an open foe to David, whose enmity he repaid by relieving his distresses-he dies, calling on God to bless him."

Better still than this is the commentary upon it of the writer in Blackwood. Here it is:

"All this is well said, and justly said. It is true that Garrick's fame is now not much to

any one. A man who has slept well' for three-fourths of a century may fairly henceforth sleep in peace. Yet there is some satisfaction in believing that soon or late, justice will be done to every one. A race of feeble authors and needy actors who continually begged from Roscius during his life, attempted to make money of their own bitterness, by scribbling memoirs of him when he was in his grave. His reluctance to pamper these paltry people with money, was his crime; and Foote, and other profligates of the same school, who never kept a shilling nor deserved to have had one, employed themselves in railing at the parsimony of a man who by his mere talents had made a handsome fortune-lived like a gentleman, while they were swindling every body-kept up a rank for his profession which it had never known before-associated with the first men of the land for ability, learning, and station-was the friend of Burke, Johnson, the great Chatham, Earl Camden, Reynolds, and a crowd of others, forming the best society of Europe-and, after all this, at his death left an opulent establishment to his widow. The man who did these things might be prudent, but he was the reverse of mean or parsimonious; in fact, he was evi

dently liberal where liberality could be well placed. Johnson and Goldsmith knew this by long experience, though coxcombs and swindlers, drudges and drones, might have felt that his purse-strings were too tight for them to dip their hands in.”

There is something very wholesome in this kind of writing, and it is very applicable to many persons belonging to what is called "the literary world" at the present time. This commentator might, however, have gone further than to say merely that the man who did as Garrick did."might be prudent." He must have been prudent, or he never could have enjoyed such eminent respectability as a member of society, along with such prodigious applause as an actor. There are wretched people who affect to despise this prudence, because they have not the virtue to practise it. There are some who appear to think that, because they have rather more genius and learning than the common crowd, and a knack of writing, they are therefore to be absolved from all those rules of prudence, punctuality, and justice, which govern grocers and the like, who desire to be respectable. This is mere impudence at the best, and very often but a flimsy cover for mere swindling. There are people who habitually try to get money beforehand on a specific promise of work to be performed, and then totally neglect the work, upon the plea that their spirits

are so harassed, and their genius so troubled by the vulgar wants and difficulties of life, that they cannot do what they undertook to do. These people are swindlers; and the fact is, in nine cases out of ten, that they have, by pampering themselves with indulgence at the expense of others, created that incapacity for work which they attribute, forsooth, to the peculiar irritability of mind which attends on genius! These are the people who become calumniators of the prudent who have refused to comply with their unjust and preposterous requests, and these are they who, on the other hand, pour out their nasty adulation upon one another as a matter of trade, while in their private talk they treat with ridicule and contempt that which they cheat the public into buying by their praise. Thus it happens that in London a certain sort of swiftly-produced literature and of systematic swindling go on continually, hand in hand.

LIVING ABROAD.

AFTER having had so many talks with my muchesteemed listeners, I doubt not that they have found out that laborious laugh-makers are no favourites with me. I love intelligent seriousness, and artless cheerfulness, believing the latter to be the greatest blessing, after a dutiful

and religious heart, that a human creature can possess. But what is commonly and coarsely esteemed under the name of fun I do not relish, but rather detest. These things being so, it will excite no surprise when I say that such things as "Comic Annuals," "Hood's Own," and other toilsomely constructed incentives to "broad grins," are to me, very irksome, and even distressing. I have, however, chanced to see some specimens of a new book by Mr. Hood, the public jester, which book gives an account of a family journey up the Rhine, and I have found therein matter both agreeable and instructive. I find, indeed, the usual vice of exaggeration, which seems to pervade and permeate all our lighter literature of the present day, even as chemists were wont to say the caloric fluid pervades and permeates all material substance; but, waving that, which appears to be an evil hopeless and incurable, there will be found much common sense and shrewd observation along with the jocularity of the journey up the Rhine."

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With respect to living in Germany, or rather in the towns upon the Rhine, for the sake of retrenchment, one of the persons introduced says, very sensibly, that "on the same plan" retrenchment might be almost as surely effected in London. "Lodge," says he, "in a second floor, dispense with a carpet, have as little and as plain furniture as possible, burn wood in a