HARTE, Walter, the historian of Gustavus Adolphus, was born about the beginning of the eighteenth century. He received his education at Marlborough School, from which he was sent to Oxford, where he took his master’s degree on the 30th of June 1720. He early acquired an intimacy with Pope, and, in 1727, published a volume of poems dedicated to the Earl of Peterborough, who, in consequence, took some notice of him. In 1730, he published an Essay on Satire, 8vo, and, in 1735, an Essay on Reason, folio, to which Pope is understood to have been a contributor. He afterwards became vice-principal of St Mary Hall, and obtained so much reputation as a tutor that Lord Lyttleton recommended him as private and travelling preceptor to his natural son, in which capacity he acted from 1746 to 1750. In 1759, he published his History of Gustavus Adolphus, in two vols. 4to; a work on which he had bestowed much labour, and in which he has undoubtedly accumulated a large body of valuable materials. But this is nearly all that can be said in its favour. Harte had learning, industry, and the spirit of research, with no inconsiderable share of military and even political knowledge; he had also access to the most valuable materials, and his work, with all its faults, may therefore be considered as in a certain sense original. But it is totally destitute of arrangement and method; and, from the affectation of employing uncouth words and phrases, as well as from the adoption of a style singularly harsh, pedantic, and involved, which, by some strange hallucination, he appears to have considered as fine writing, it is even more deficient in perspicuity than in the other qualities essential to historical composition. The idea of digesting his materials into a regular narrative seems never to have occurred to him, or, if it did, to have been disregarded, possibly from a conscious incapacity for giving it effect. Dr Johnson was, however, of opinion that the defects of Harte’s history proceeded more from foppery than imbecility, and that these are to be attributed not so much to want of talent as to inordinate and overweening conceit; but whatever the cause may have been, the result is unfortunately the same. Harte left London on the day of the publication of his book, that he might be out of the way of the great praise he was to receive; and he was ashamed to return when he found how very ill it had succeeded. Robertson’s History of Scotland had been published about a month before; Hume’s History of the House of Tudor appeared the same week; and it is not wonderful that, after perusing these masterpieces of historical composition, the public should consider Harte’s style as intolerable. Towards the close of his life, he solaced his solitary and painful hours by devotional reading, and died unmarried, though at what precise date has not been ascertained. His only other productions are some Sermons, and the Amaranth, a poem which, as he informs us, was written for his private consolation under a lingering and dangerous state of health, and which is strongly marked with that serious cast of feeling with which every man of a rightly-constituted mind regards his approaching end. (a.)