Mr. Curran's bon-mots and sallies of humour were first-rate. He sometimes indulged in poetry, in which he did not excel. His taste in it was but indifferent. He neither liked Paradise Lost nor Romeo and Juliet. He had an ear for music, and both played and sung his native ballads delightfully. He contended that the English had no national music. He was an enthusiastic admirer of Mrs. Siddons. He said of John Kemble, that, he had an eye rather to look at than to lock with.' His great passion was a love of English literature and the society of literary men. He occasionally found his account in it. Being one day in a group of philosophers, and the invention of fire being spoken of, one of the party suggested that it was from seeing a horse's shoe strike fire; and I suppose,' said Curran triumphantly, 'the horse-shoe was afterwards made with that fire.'

THE COURT JOURNAL-A DIALOGUE

The Atlas.]

[June 7, 1829.

M.-Have you seen the Court Journal? G.-No: I only read some Maxims on Love,' which I seemed to have met with in some pre-existent work.

M.-Then you may tell C― from me it will not last three months. People of fashion do not want to read accounts of themselves, written by those who know nothing of the matter. This eternal babble about high life is an affront to every one else, and an impertinence with respect to those whom it is stupidly meant to flatter. What do those care about tiresome descriptions of satin ottomans and ormolu carvings, who are sick of seeing them from morning till night? No! they would rather read an account of Donald Bean Lean's Highland cave, strewed with rushes, or a relation of a row in a night-cellar in St. Giles's. What they and all mankind want, is to vary the monotonous round of their existence; to go out of themselves as much as possible; and not to have their own oppressive and idle pretensions served up to them again in a hash of mawkish affectation. They read Cobbett-it is like an electrical shock to them, or a plunge in a cold-bath: it braces while it jars their enervated fibres. He is a sturdy, blunt yeoman: the other is a foppish footman, dressed up in cast-off finery. Or if Lord L is delighted with a description (not well-done) of his own house and furniture, do you suppose that Lord H―, who is his rival in gewgaws and upholstery, will not be equally uneasy at it? As to the vulgar, what they like is to see fine sights and not to hear of them. They like to get inside a fine house, to see fine

things and touch them if they dare, and not to be tantalized with a vapid inventory, which does not gratify their senses, and mortifies their pride and sense of privation. The exaggerated admiration only makes the exclusion more painful: it is like a staring sign to a show which one has not money in one's pocket to pay for seeing. Mere furniture or private property can never be a subject to interest the public: the possessor is entitled to the sole benefit of it. If there were an account in the newspaper that all this finery was burnt to ashes, then all the world would be eager to read it, saying all the time how sorry they were, and what a shocking thing it was.

G.-Servants and country-people always turn to the accidents and offences in a newspaper.

M.-And their masters and mistresses too. Did you never read the Newgate Calendar?

G.-Yes.

M. Well, that is not genteel. This is what renders the Beggar's Opera so delightful; you despise the actors in the scene, and yet the wit galls and brings down their betters from their airy flight with all their borrowed plumage, so that we are put absolutely at our ease for the time with respect to our own darling pretensions. Gwas here the other evening; he said he thought the Beggar's Opera came after Shakspeare. I wonder who put that in his head; it was hardly his own discovery.

G.-It seems neither Lord Byron nor Burke liked the Beggar's Opera.

M.-They were the losers by that opinion: but how do you account for it?

G.-Lord Byron was a radical peer, Burke an upstart plebeian; neither of them felt quite secure in the niche where they had stationed themselves from the random-shots that were flying on the stage. They could not say with Hamlet, 'Our withers are unwrung.' As to Lord Byron, he might not relish the point of Mrs. Peachum's speech, 'Married a highwayman! Why, hussey, you will be as ill-treated and as much neglected as if you had married a lord!' Did you ever hear the story of Miss when she was quite a girl, going to see Mrs. Siddons in the Fatal Marriage, and being taken out fainting into the lobby, and calling out, Oh Biron, Biron!'- Egad!' said the cool narrator of the story, she has had enough of Byron since !' With regard to Burke, there was a rotten core, a Serbonian bog in his understanding, in which not only Gay's master-piece but the whole of what modern literature, wit, and reason had done for the world, sunk and was swallowed up in a fetid abyss for ever! But I am sorry you think no better of the Court Journal. I was in hopes

it might succeed, as a very old friend of mine has something to do with it.

M.-Oh! but mischief must be put a stop to. This is the most nauseous toad-eating, and it is as awkwardly done as it is ill-meant. There is a fulsome pretence set up in one paper that rank consists in birth and blood. It is at once to neutralise all the present race of fashion. The civil wars of York and Lancaster put an end to almost all the old nobility-there are none of the Plantagenets left now. Those who go to court think themselves lucky if they can trace as far back as the Nell Gwynns and Duchess of Clevelands in Charles the Second's days. Besides, all this prejudice about nobility and ancestry should be understood and worshipped in silence and at a distance, not thrown in the teeth of such people, as if they had nothing else to boast of. They should be told of perfections which they have not, as you praise a wit for her beauty and a fool for her wit. Your friend should read Count Grammont to learn how to flatter and cajole. Does not Mr. C know enough from experience of the desire of lords and ladies to turn authors, and shine, not in a ballroom, but on his counter?

G. He expects the Kto write; nay, it was with difficulty he was dissuaded from offering a round sum.

M.-How much, pray?

G.-Five thousand guineas for half a page.

M.—It would not sell a single copy. People would think it was a hoax and would not buy it. Those who believed it would not read it. Oh! there is a letter of Louis XVIII. in a late number, on the death of some lady he was attached to: it is prettily done, but it is such good English, that I suspect it can hardly be a translation or an original. If they could procure curious documents of this kind, and had a magazine of the secrets, anecdotes, and correspondence of people of high rank, undoubtedly it would answer; but this would be another edition of the Jockey Club, and very different from its present insipidity. Even children will not be crammed with honey.

G.-I understand there is to be no scandal. All the great are to be supposed to be elegantly good, and to wear virtue with a grace peculiar to people of fashion.

M.-That will at any rate be new. And then I see there are criticisms on pictures: the writer is thrown into raptures with the portraits of Lord and Lady Castlereagh. And this is followed by a drawling, pitiable account of two little Corregios, as if they were miracles and had descended from heaven-the Madonna' and 'Mercury teaching Cupid to read.' They are well enough, though Sir Joshua has done the same thing better. But higher praise could not

be lavished on the St. Jerome' or the Night at Dresden,' or the Ceiling at Parma,' which is his best, though it has fallen into decay.

G.-Collectors think one Corregio just as good as another; and it is to meet this feeling, probably, that the article is written.

THE LATE DR. PRIESTLEY

[June 14, 1829.

The Atlas.] THE epithet of the late could not be applied to this celebrated character in the sense in which it has been turned upon some late wits and dinner-hunters as never being in time; if he had a fault, it was that of being precipitate and premature, of sitting down to the banquet which he had prepared for others before it was half-done; of seeing things with too quick and hasty a glance, of finding them in embryo, and leaving them too often in an unfinished state. This turn of his intellect had to do with his natural temper-he was impatient, somewhat peevish and irritable in little things, though not from violence or acerbity, but from seeing what was proper to be done quicker than others, and not liking to wait for an absurdity. On great and trying occasions, he was calm and resigned, having been schooled by the lessons of religion and philosophy, or, perhaps, from being, as it were, taken by surprise, and never having been accustomed to the indulgence of strong passions or violent emotions. His frame was light, fragile, neither strong nor elegant; and in going to any place, he walked on before his wife (who was a tall, powerful woman) with a primitive simplicity, or as if a certain restlessness and hurry impelled him on with a projectile force before others. His personal appearance was altogether singular and characteristic. It belonged to the class which may be called scholastic. His feet seemed to have been entangled in a gown, his features to have been set in a wig or taken out of a mould. There was nothing to induce you to say with the poet, that his body thought'; it was merely the envelop of his mind. In his face there was a strange mixture of acuteness and obtuseness; the nose was sharp and turned up, yet rounded at the end, a keen glance, a quivering lip, yet the aspect placid and indifferent, without any of that expression which arises either from the close workings of the passions or an intercourse with the world. You discovered the prim, formal look of the Dissenter-none of the haughtiness of the churchman nor the wildness of the visionary. He was, in fact, always the student in his closet, moved in or out, as it happened, with no perceptible variation:

he sat at his breakfast with a folio volume before him on one side and a sote-book on the other; and if a question were asked him, answered it like an absent man. He stammered, spoke thick, and huddled his words angracefully together. To him the whole business of life consisted in reading and writing; and the ordinary concerns of this world were considered as a frivolous or mechanical interruption to the more important interests of science and of a future state. Dr. ParsTLEY might, in external appearance, have passed for a French priest, or the lay-brother of a convent: in literature, he was the Voltaire of the Unitarians. He did not, like Mr. Southey, to be sure (who has been denominated the English Voltaire,) vary from prose to poetry, or from one side of a question to another; but he took in a vast range of subjects of very opposite characters, treated them all with the same acuteness, spirit, facility, and perspicuity, and notwithstanding the intricacy and novelty of many of his speculations, it may be safely asserted that there is not an obscure sentence in all he wrote. Those who run may read. He wrote on history, grammar, law, politics, divinity, metaphysics, and natural philosophy-and those who perused his works fancied themselves entirely, and were in a great measure, masters of all these subjects. He was one of the very few who could make abstruse questions popular; and in this respect he was on a par with Paley with twenty times his discursiveness and subtlety. Paley's loose casuistry, which is his strong-hold and chief attraction, he got (every word of it) from Abraham Tucker's Light of Nature. A man may write fluently on a number of topics with the same pen, and that pen a very blunt one; but this was not Dr. Priestley's case; the studies to which he devoted himself with so much success and eclat required different and almost incompatible faculties. What for instance can be more distinct or more rarely combined than metaphysical refinement and a talent for experimental philosophy? The one picks up the grains, the other spins the threads of thought. Yet Dr. Priestley was certainly the best controversialist of his day, and one of the best in the language; and his chemical experiments (so curious a variety in a dissenting minister's pursuits) laid the foundation and often nearly completed the superstructure of most of the modern discoveries in that science. This is candidly and gratefully acknowledged by the French chemists, however the odium theologicum may slur over the obligation in this country, or certain fashionable lecturers may avoid the repetition of startling names. Priestley's Controversy with Dr. Price is a masterpiece not only of ingenuity, vigour, and logical clearness, but of verbal dexterity and artful evasion of difficulties, if any one need a model of this kind. His antagonist stood no chance with him in the dazzling