Page:Lives of Poets-Laureate.djvu/404

390 destiny, and marred all prospects of rank and wealth; but it has made me happy, and it will make me immortal."

We may not antedate the decision of posterity, but we think the dream of the boy a safer omen than the assumption of the man. Nature had gifted him with unparalleled facility—alike his blessing and his bane. Its effect is conspicuous in all he accomplished—epic, essay, history—of all the most alluring charm, and the most fatal defect. The poems he blushed not to compare with "Paradise Lost;" the histories he delivered to the world "in full reliance of the approbation of those ages to which they were bequeathed," are long narrative pieces, invented and compiled too often with little judgment, by a consummate master of language, and unalluring from the remoteness of their subject-matter. "The value of an historical work" he deemed "to be in proportion to the store of facts which it first embodied;" and under this fatal misconception, his ponderous quartos increased in bulk, and he fancied that, while recapitulating incidents, he was writing history.

Thus his histories are mere specimens of prose narrative, manufactured, like his epics, by daily process. His system of reading and writing was so unremitting and so unvaried, that his mind at last resembled a machine, capable of turning out its required piecework, with mechanical regularity. His reflective faculty was deficient in power, because he never exercised it. Living apart from the world, he studied not man in his actions, and his perpetual reading left him no time to study human nature in himself; and thus his history is deficient in the deeper and more essential elements, and while poring over his prolonged pages, we sigh for the masterly portraiture of Clarendon, or the wide and vigorous grasp of thought that informs the great production of Gibbon.