topics. His truths are old, but there are no real truths of human life and conduct, worth anything at all, that are of yesterday. Human love itself is called “the old, old story;” but do we therefore cease from loving, or from finding such ways as we can of saying that we love. Dr. Johnson was not at his wisest when he found fault with Lord Lyttelton because, in his “Dialogues of the Dead,” “that man sat down to write a book, to tell the world what the world had all his life been telling him.” This was exactly what he wished to do. In the Preface to his revised edition Lord Lyttelton said, “Sometimes a new dress may render an old truth more pleasing to those whom the mere love of novelty betrays into error, as it frequently does not only the wits, but the sages of these days. Indeed, one of the best services that could now be done to mankind by any good writer would be the bringing them back to common sense, from which the desire of shining by extraordinary notions has seduced great numbers, to the no small detriment of morality and of all real knowledge.”
At any rate, we now find it worth while to know what the world had been telling all his life to an enlightened, highly-educated man, who was an active politician in the days of Walpole and of
the elder Pitt, who was a friend of Pope’s and of the best writers of the day, and who in his occasional verse added at least one line to the household words of English literature when in his warm-hearted Prologue to Thomson’s play of Coriolanus, produced after its writer’s death, he said of that poet what we may say of Lord Lyttelton himself, that he gave to the world
“Not one immoral, one corrupted thought,
One line which, dying, he could wish to blot.”
H. M.
DIALOGUES OF THE DEAD.
DIALOGUE I.
Lord Falkland—Mr. Hampden.
Lord Falkland.—Are not you surprised to see me in Elysium, Mr. Hampden?
Mr. Hampden.—I was going to put the same question to your lordship, for doubtless you thought me a rebel.