What that mental attitude was capable of, in the way
of an elegant, yet plain-spoken, and life-like delineation of men's
moods and manners, as also in the way of determining those moods and
manners themselves to all that was lively, unaffected, and
harmonious, can be seen nowhere better than in Mr. Austin Dobson's
Selections from Steele (Clarendon Press) prefaced by his careful
"Life." The well-known qualities of [10] Mr. Dobson's own original
work are a sufficient guarantee of the taste and discrimination we
may look for in a collection like this, in which the random
lightnings of the first of the essayists are grouped under certain
heads--"Character Sketches," "Tales and Incidents," "Manners and
Fashions," and the like--so as to diminish, for the general reader,
the scattered effect of short essays on a hundred various subjects,
and give a connected, book-like character to the specimens.
Steele, for one, had certainly succeeded in putting himself, and his
way of taking the world--for this pioneer of an everybody's
literature had his subjectivities--into books. What a survival of
one long-past day, for instance, in "A Ramble from Richmond to
London"! What truth to the surface of common things, to their direct
claim on our interest! yet with what originality of effect in that
truthfulness, when he writes, for instance:
"I went to my lodgings, led by a light, whom I put into the discourse
of his private economy, and made him give me an account of the
charge, hazard, profit, and loss of a family that depended upon a
link.
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