His life was a strange
melodrama, so varied with laughter and tears, so checkered with fame and
misfortune, so resounding with songs pathetic and comic, that, were he an
unknown hero, his adventures would be read with pleasure by all persons of
sensibility. There is no better illustration of the _subjective_ in
literature. It is the man who is presented to us in his works, and who can
no more be disjoined from them than the light from the vase, the beauties
of which it discloses. As an essayist, he was of the school of Addison and
Steele; but he has more ease of style and more humor than his teachers. As
a dramatist, he had many and superior competitors in his own vein; and yet
his plays still occupy the stage. As an historian, he was fluent but
superficial; and yet the charm of his style and the easy flow of his
narrative, have given his books currency as manuals of instruction. And
although as a writer of fiction, or of truth gracefully veiled in the
garments of fiction, he stands unrivalled in his beautiful and touching
story of the incorruptible _Vicar_, yet this is his only complete story,
and presents but one side of his literary character.
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