June 2. 1855.J 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



431 



dard of copiousness observed in the earlier 

 editions. 



M.'s good opinion of Gorton's Dictionary would 

 be endorsed by me, in substance at least. What 

 book of the kind, upon the whole, should take 

 precedence of it? Lempriere and Watkins, the 

 authorities in the first quarter of the century, are 

 becoming obsolete ; perhaps are not now reprinted 

 at all. Maunder's Biographical Treasury, a 

 portly duodecimo, re-issued every three to five 

 years, has many good points, but its dimensions 

 suffice not at all to meet the public want ; besides 

 which, it seems to graduate the Importance of the 

 departed, and, of course, the length of its articles, 

 by their nearness or the contrary to our own day. 

 The delineation is the minutest where its help is 

 the least needed. William A. Becket [?] 's name 

 distinguishes another collection of the sort, two or 

 three times met with (3 vols. 8vo.), dateless, though, 

 from internal marks, evidently of the year 1834-5. 

 But obscurity hangs about it. The Reviews, one 

 and all, ignore its existence ; and it has been a 

 lost labour to ferret out anything of the author 

 beyond his name. This work, it may be added, 

 scouts authorities, divides its pages with strange 

 inequality between the two halves of the alphabet, 

 and includes, with very dubious wisdom, among 

 its subjects, more or less living names. Under the 

 auspices of Lord Brougham's Society, so called, a 

 new dictionary of the sort commenced, edited by 

 George Long. It made out, by the close of the 

 sixth volume (1842-44), to wind up the letter A;; 

 and its own winding up at that point was probably 

 felt by none to be a serious loss. Its leading 

 hobby, if the writer's memory serves, was to revive 

 an incredible number of Oriental rabbis, who had 

 in every sense slept till then. The collection, 

 ostensibly that of Henry J. Rose, makes an im- 

 posing array of volumes (12 vols. Svo.), and it has 

 been largely imported by the leading Boston book- 

 firms (Little, Brown, & Co.). But has it not 

 a very suspicious look, that the three opening 

 letters of the alphabet monopolise exactly half of 

 the entire work? Now if there be but simple 

 justice done to the one-eighth part (and the writer 

 would engage to find even within those limits a 

 goodly show of omissions), what sort of justice 

 remains for the other seven-eighths? Finally, 

 the name of Mr. Rose in the front of the volumes 

 is an unsolved enigma. That gentleman died at 

 Florence near the close of 1838, three years, if not 

 more, before the date of the very earliest of the 

 series; and it is to be noted, that the Annual Regis- 

 ter of 18:^9, sketching his life and character, sums 

 up his labours with no allusion at all to the above 

 work. 



With any of these, then, Gorton need not decline 

 comparison. But his superiority is not such as to 

 leave them out of sight ; and poorly will he abide 

 the standard, if it comes to that, of ideal excel- 



lence. Running back from the stand-point of 

 1 833, our list, not five years old, counts up his de- 

 ficiencies, probably to sixteen hundred or more. 

 Preciseness in such enumeration is neither im- 

 portant nor possible. A third part of these (by 

 random guess), as found in most other collections 

 — to a certain extent, in all, -^ must excite our 

 special wonder. A few notable cases of oversight 

 there are, which no plea of human infirmity can 

 well excuse. Montrose, " saved as by fire," is 

 thought of just in season for the Supplement. But 

 the numerous and lordly race of Guise is passed by 

 in silence (though their rivals the Condes receive 

 imperfect, and the Orleans house fuller, justice) ; 

 while Potemkin's name is unseen, the first per- 

 haps in the annals of Northern Europe, royalties 

 aside ; and so it is, proh pudor, with Hamilton, the 

 most precocious, most variously-gifted, and most 

 lamented man that graces the story of this re- 

 public. 



But who would credit the number of names, 

 neither obscure nor mean, unpreserved by any 

 of the collectors ? The doubt would vanish, if 

 doubt there had been, what slavish copyists, almost 

 to a man, this class of bookmakers are. Tell us, who 

 can, of a work in this kind, that was the fruit of 

 an early direction of mind in that quarter, and of 

 the slow and patient accretion of materials in the 

 course of multifarious reading. Yet what pretence 

 to the title has any Universal Biography that did 

 not so begin ? It were curious, after some degree 

 of intimacy made with this or that profession or 

 class (as artists, comedialis, booksellers and print- 

 ers, &c.), or in lieu, with some section of modern 

 history, to recur to the dictionaries in question, 

 while the memory is crowded with names. Let 

 him who applies this touchstone, mark the amount 

 of lost painstaking. Let him try by this method 

 the twenty-five years prior to the Restoration ; 

 the age of the preliminary troubles of Charles, 

 and the civil wars of the Commonwealth and Pro- 

 tectorate. What other has so nearly been ex- 

 hausted by the writers of our times? But put 

 Cromwell, Strafford, and Laud aside, there come in 

 the very van twice as many more, some of whom 

 will loom up to the reader unnamed, as to whom 

 Doctors Aikin and Kippis, Tooke and Alexander 

 Chalmers, with all their successors downward, seem 

 to have been wholly in the dark. Like those dis- 

 tant stars, whose light (if we believe astronomers), 

 ever travelling, may be said never to reach us, so 

 the fame of those men of lofty mark seems to be 

 still on its way to the ears of such wise ones as 

 were just named. The authors of the boasted 

 Biographic Uaiverselle are not more free from 

 this reproach than any of the rest. The writer 

 does indeed, once in a while, after a vain chase 

 elsewhere, alight upon his object here. But these 

 fortunate cases had ever the recommendation of 

 being Frenchmen. Thus, the leaders of the Yen- 



