SOUTHEY'S LIVES OF THE BRITISH ADMIRALS. THE Fourth Volume of
this work contains the lives of the two great rivals for Court favour, and two striking instances of its insufficiency to procure safety, happiness, honour, or self-respect— the Earl of Essex and Sir WALTER RALEIGH. In the short and brilliant, but feverish life of ESSEX, and in the mistaken weakness, not to say priest-ridden pusillanimity of his close, by which he betrayed his confederates to the vengeance of power; or in the questionable intrigues, the selfish ambition, and the spirit of adventure without the luck or the recklessness necessary to its success, by which most of RALEIGH'S years were distins guished,—there is little on which the lover of human happiness can linger with delight, less which the stern moralist can regard without feeling a call upon him for pardon.. As regards men- tal powers, RALEIGH was a marked man even in the sera of SHAKSPEARE and JONSON; but ESSEX certainly was not. Ho never could have made his way like his rival. Without the ads ventitious aids of rank and ancestry, he would most probably have fallen as a petty leader in some wild adventure, and nothing been heard of ROBERT DEVEREUX. In morality, neither CON above the common average of a very indifferent age, when the old baro- nial spirit was destroyed by the power of the Sovereign, without being replaced by the still higher independence of the freeman. These points, however, only affect the character of the heroes, not that of their lives; which is full of variety, success, reverses, and misfortunes ; and Dr. SOUTHEY has told the facts and attend- ant circumstances in the career of each, with much of his habitual elegance and biographical skill, and expanded them from the stores of his multifarious reading. Fulness and completeness is their merit; though it rather takes the character of original materials than of an original production. We certainly have a contemporary spirit, because we often have a contemporary narra- tive; but the reader disposed to criticize rigidly may desire a stronger and more rapid tale, and exclaim, " Why am I called upon to read a page, when the biographer should have given me its pith in a few sentences ? " Tested as part of a series, this volume is also chargeable with the fault of disproportion. Neither ESSEX nor RALEIGH were peculiarly distinguished as Admirals. If the rest of the naval heroes are to fill a space proportioned to their nautical greatness, where will the work end?
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