372 CANADA IN THE BODLEIAN. 



pictures, lampoons and pictorial caricatures of the time," and accom- 

 panied by nearly four hundred illustrations on steel and wood. Since 

 then a series of papers entitled " Historical Sketches of the Eeign of 

 George the Second," in successive numbers of Blackwood, has reawa- 

 kened the curiosity of the reading public on the same subject. Of 

 the sketches in Blackwood, Mrs. Oliphant is the writer. They are now 

 published in collected form, and have been reprinted in the United 

 States. In Mrs. Oliphant's volume, significantly enough, no chapter is 

 devoted to the King himself, but one is given to the Queen, as being, 

 in point of sense, the better man ; George's good genius, while she 

 lived, saving him and probably the nation from serious calamity. Sir 

 Eobert Walpole is sketched as "The Minister" of the era. Sir Robert 

 has also lately been evoked from the shades for the contemplation of 

 the modern public by Lord Lytton, in his rhymed comedy of " Walpole^ 

 or Every Man has his Price." Next we have Chesterfield, portrayed as 

 " The Man of the World" of the period; with pictures of Pope as 

 "The Poet J " of John Wesley as " The Reformer;" of Commodore 

 Anson as " The Sailor ; " of Richardson as " The Novelist ; " of 

 Hume as " The Sceptic;" of Hogarth as ''The Painter." Chapters 

 are devoted likewise to the Young Chevalier and Lady Mary Wortley 

 Montagu. In depicting this remarkable group, no special occasion 

 presented itself for delineating the denizens of the colleges and halls of 

 the universities, engaged at their literary work. The notes here ofi'ered 

 will give a momentary glimpse of them thus employed. It is in another 

 relation that they are referred to in the sketch of Wesley, " The Refor- 

 mer." Wolfe's career, in which we in Canada naturally feel a peculiar 

 interest, was brilliant but very brief; otherwise we might have expected 

 a chapter to have been assigned to him as " The Soldier" of the day. 

 He also, or at least his name and fame, will come repeatedly before us 

 in the course of our Oxford extracts. Of the whole era to which our 

 attention is thus directed, it has been said, by a writer on the same 

 subject in a late number of the Quarterh/ Review, that it was ''a time 

 of order without loyalty; of piety without faith; of poetry without 

 rapture ; of philosophy without science. In one word, it was an age 

 without enthusiasm." But then, as the same writer adds, " the absence 

 of enthusiasm is not necessarily fatal to the existence of a high sense 

 of duty ; a quiet, unobtrusive, religious spirit ; an honest, if not a 

 very profound, inquiry into the problems of human life, and the sources 

 of human knowledge : while it is eminently favorable to that polished, 



