ESSAYS AND REVIEWS. BY EDWIN P. WHIPPLE. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. SECOND EDITION. BOSTON: TICKNOR, REED, AND FIELDS. M DCCC LI. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1850, BY EDWIN P. WHIPPLE, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the District of Massachusetts. Stereotyped by BOSTON. ESSAYS AND REVIEWS. MACAULAY.* It is impossible to cast even a careless glance over the literature of the last thirty years, without perceiving the prominent station occupied by critics, reviewers and essayists. Criticism, in the old days of Monthly Reviews and Gentlemen's Magazines, was quite an humble occupation, and was chiefly monopolized by the "barren rascals" of letters, who scribbled, sinned and starved, in attics and cellars; but it has since been almost exalted into a creative art, and numbers among its professors some of the most accomplished writers of the age. Dennis, Rhymer, Winstanley, Theophilus Cibber, Griffiths, and other "eminent hands," as well as the nameless contributors to defunct periodicals, have departed, body and soul, and left not a wreck behind; and their places have been supplied by such men as Coleridge, Carlyle, Macaulay, Lamb, Hazlitt, Jeffrey, Wilson, Gifford, Mackintosh, Sydney Smith, Hallam, Campbell, Talfourd, and Brougham. Indeed, every celebrated * Boston Miscellany, February, 1843. |