and shuddered over each fresh incarnation of Mrs. Radcliffe.  Soame Jenyns was dead, indeed, in the flesh, but his influence stalked at nights under the lamps and where disputants were gathered together in country rectories.  Dr. Parr affected the Olympian nod, and crowned or checkmated reputations.  “A flattering message from Dr. P——­” sends our Diarist into ecstasies so excessive that a reaction sets in, and the “predominant and final effect upon my mind has been depression rather than elevation.”  We think of

  The yarns Jack Hall invented, and the songs Jem Roper sung. 
  And where are now Jem Roper and Jack Hall?

Who cares now for Parr’s praise or Soame Jenyns’ censure?  Yet in our Diarist’s pages these take equal rank with names that time has spared, with Robertson and Gibbon, Burke and Reynolds.

Thomas Green was more ready for experiment in art than in literature.  He was “particularly struck” at the Royal Academy of 1797 with a sea view by a painter called Turner: 

“Fishing vessels coming in with a heavy swell in apprehension of a tempest, gathering in the distance, and casting as it advances a night of shade, while a parting glow is spread with fine effect upon the shore; the whole composition bold in design and masterly in execution.  I am entirely unacquainted with the artist, but if he proceeds as he has begun, he cannot fail to become the first in his department.”

A remarkable prophecy, and one of the earliest notices we possess of the effect which the youthful Turner, then but twenty-two years of age, made on his contemporaries.

As a rule, except when he is travelling, our Diarist almost entirely occupies himself with a discussion of the books he happens to be reading.  His opinions are not always in concert with the current judgment of to-day; he admires Warburton much more than we do, and Fielding much less.  But he never fails to be amusing, because so independent within the restricted bounds of his intellectual domain.  He is shut up in his eighteenth century like a prisoner, but inside its wall his liberty of action is complete.  Sometimes his judgments are sensibly in advance of his age.  It was the fashion in 1798 to denounce the Letters of Lord Chesterfield as frivolous and immoral.  Green takes a wider view, and in a thoughtful analysis points out their judicious merits and their genuine parental assiduity.  When Green can for a moment lift his eyes from his books, he shows a sensitive quality of observation which might have been cultivated to general advantage.  Here is a reflection which seems to be as novel as it is happy: 

“Looked afterwards into the Roman Catholic Chapel in Duke Street.  The thrilling tinkle of the little bell at the elevation of the Host is perhaps the finest example that can be given of the sublime by association—­nothing so poor and trivial in itself, nothing so transcendently awful, as indicating the sudden change in the consecrated Elements, and the instant presence of the Redeemer.”