Excepting Congreve, I do not remember that any of the poets, whose lives have been written by Johnson, is said to have produced anything in the shape of a novel. Of the Incognita of Congreve, that biographer observes, not very satisfactorily, that he would rather praise it than read it. In the present series, Goldsmith, Smollett, and Johnson himself, if his Rasselas entitle him to rank in the number, are among the most distinguished in this species of writing, of whom modern Europe can boast. To these, if there be added the names of De Foe, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne, not to mention living authors, we may produce such a phalanx as scarcely any other nation can equal. Indeed no other could afford a writer so wide a field for the exercise of this talent as ours, where the fullest scope and encouragement are given to the human mind to expand itself in every direction, and assume every shape and hue, by the freedom of the government, and by the complexity of civil and commercial interests. No one has portrayed the whimsical varieties of character, particularly in lower life, with a happier vein of burlesque than Smollett. He delights, indeed, chiefly by his strong delineation of ludicrous incidents and grotesque manners derived from this source. He does not hold our curiosity entangled by the involution of his story, nor suspend it by any artful protraction of the main event. He turns aside for no digression that may serve to display his own ingenuity or learning. From the beginning to the end, one adventure commonly rises up and follows upon another, like so many waves of the sea, which cease only because they have reached the shore. The billows float in order to the shore, The wave behind rolls on the wave before. Admirable as the art of the novelist is, we ought not to confound it with that of the poet; nor to conclude, because the characters of Parson Adams, Colonel Bath, and Squire Western in Fielding; and of Strap, Morgan, and Pipes, in Smollett, impress themselves as strongly on the memory, and seem to be as really individuals whom we have seen and conversed with, as many of those which are the most decidedly marked in Shakspeare himself; that therefore the powers requisite for producing such descriptions are as rare and extraordinary in one instance as in the other. For the poet has this peculiar to himself; that he communicates something from his own mind, which, at the same time that it does not prevent his personages from being kept equally distinct from one another, raises them all above the level of our common nature. Shakspeare, whom we appear not only to know, personally, but to admire and love as one superior to the cast of his kind,-- Sweetest Shakspeare, fancy's child, has left some trick of his own lineaments and features discoverable in the whole brood. Igneus est ollis vigor et coelestis origo Seminibus.