of egotism.  Against the story of Nash and the Duchess of Queensberry, so wholesome and humane, we put that frightful anecdote that Saint-Simon tells of Lauzun’s getting the hand of another duchess under his high heel, and pirouetting on it to make the heel dig deeper into the flesh.  In all the repertory of Nash’s extravagances there is not one story of this kind, not one that reveals a wicked force.  He was fatuous, but beneficent; silly, but neither cruel nor corrupt.

Goldsmith, in this second edition at least, has taken more pains with his life of Nash than he ever took again in a biography.  His Parnell, his Bolingbroke, his Voltaire, are not worthy of his name and fame; not all the industry of annotators can ever make them more than they were at first—­potboilers, turned out with no care or enthusiasm, and unconscientiously prepared.  But this subtle figure of a Master of Ceremonial; this queer old presentment of a pump-room king, crowned with a white hat, waiting all day long in his best at the bow-window of the Smyrna Coffee-House to get a bow from that other, and alas! better accredited royalty, the Prince of Wales; this picture, of an old beau, with his toy-shop of gold snuff-boxes, his agate-rings, his senseless obelisk, his rattle of faded jokes and blunted stories—­all this had something very attractive to Goldsmith both in its humour and its pathos; and he has left us, in his Life of Nash, a study which is far too little known, but which deserves to rank among the best-read productions of that infinitely sympathetic pen, which has bequeathed to posterity Mr. Tibbs and Moses Primrose and Tony Lumpkin.

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE

THE NATURAL HISTORY AND ANTIQUITIES OF SELBORNE, IN THE COUNTY OF
SOUTHAMPTON; with Engravings, and an Appendix.  London:  Printed by
T. Bensley, for B. White and Son, at Horace’s Head, Fleet Street. 
MDCCLXXXIX.

It is not always the most confidently conducted books, or those best preceded by blasts on the public trumpet, which are eventually received with highest honours into the palace of literature.  No more curious incident of this fact is to be found than is presented by the personal history of that enchanting classic, White’s Selborne.  If ever an author hesitated and reflected, dipped his toe into the bath of publicity, and hastily withdrew it again, loitered on the brink and could not be induced to plunge, it was the Rev. Gilbert White.  This man of singular genius was not to be persuaded that the town would tolerate his lucubrations.  He was ready to make a present of them to any one who would father them, he allowed his life to slip by until his seventieth year was reached, before he would print them, and when they appeared, he could not find the courage to put his name on the title-page.  Not one of his own titlarks or sedge-warblers could be more shy of public observation.  Even the fact that his own brother was a publisher gave him no real confidence in printers’ ink.