that coral embellished by the ribbon to which it is tied, and recommended by the tinkling of all the bells I could contrive to annex to it.

A man, whose vices and irregularities have brought his liberty and life into danger, will always be viewed with an eye of compassion by those who understand what human nature is made of; and while we acknowledge the severities of the law to be founded upon principles of necessity and justice, and are glad that there is such a barrier provided for the peace of society, if we consider that the difference between ourselves and the culprit is not of our own making, we shall be, as you are, tenderly affected by the view of his misery, and not less so because he has brought it upon himself.

When I see an afflicted man, I say to myself, there is perhaps a man whom the world would envy, if they knew the value of his sorrows, which are possibly intended only to soften his heart, and to turn his afflictions towards their proper centre. But when I see, or hear of a crowd of voluptuaries, who have no ears but for music, no eyes but for splendour, and no tongue but for impertinence and folly, I say this is madness. This persisted in must have a tragical conclusion. It will condemn you, not only as christians, unworthy of the name, but as intelligent creatures. You know by the light of nature, if you have not quenched it, that there is a God, and that a life like yours cannot be according to his will.

Let a man attach himself to a particular party, contend furiously for what are properly called evangelical doctrines, and enlist himself under the banner of some popular preacher, and the business is done. Behold a christian, a saint, a phœ

nix! In the mean time, perhaps, his heart, temper, and conduct are possibly less exemplary than those of some avowed infidels. No matter; he can talk; he has the Shibboleth of the true church; the bible in his pocket; and a head well-stored with notions. But the quiet, humble, modest, and peaceable person, who is, in practice, what the other is only in profession, who hates a noise, and therefore makes none, who, knowing the snares that are in the world, keeps himself as much out of it as he can, and never enters it but when duty calls, and even then with fear and trembling, is the christian, that will always stand highest in the estimation of those, who bring all characters to the test of true wisdom, and judge of the tree by its fruit.

Were I to write as many volumes as Lopez de Vega, or Voltaire, not one of them would be without a tincture of piety. If the world like it not, so much the worse for them. I make all the concessions I can, that I may please them, but I will not please them at the expence of my conscience.

The reading of Cook's last voyage afforded me much amusement, and I hope some instruction. No observation, however, forced itself upon me with more violence than one, on the death of captain Cook. God is a jealous God, and at Owhyhee the poor man was content to be worshipped. From that moment, the remarkable interposition of Providence in his favour, was converted into an opposition, that thwarted all his purposes. He left the scene of his deification, but was driven back to it by a violent storm, in which he suffered more than in any that had preceded it. When he departed, he left his worshippers still infatuated with an idea of his godship, consequently well disposed to serve him. At his return, he found them sullen, distrustful, and mysterious.

A trifling theft was committed, which by a blunder of his own in pursuing the thief, after the property had been restored, was magnified to an affair of the last importance. One of their favourite chiefs was killed too by a blunder. Nothing, in short, but blunder and mistake attended him, till he fell breathless into the water, and then all was smooth again. The world indeed will not take notice, or see that the dispensation bore evident marks of divine displeasure; but a mind, I think, in any degree spiritual, cannot overlook them.

Could a dog or a cat suggest to me the thought, that Christ is precious, I would not despise that thought because a dog or a cat suggested it; the meanness of the instrument cannot debase the nobleness of the principle. He that kneels before a picture of Christ is an idolater, but he in whose heart the sight of a picture kindles a warm remembrance of the Saviour's sufferings, must be a christian. Suppose that I dream as Gardiner did, that Christ walks before me, that he turns and smiles upon me, and fills my soul with ineffable love and joy. Will a man tell me that I am deceived, that I ought not to love or rejoice in him for such a reason, because a dream is merely a picture drawn upon the imagination; I hold not with such divinity. To love Christ is the greatest dignity of man, be that affection wrought in him how it may.

My descriptions are all from nature. Not one of them second-handed.

apparent resemblance; because at the same time that I would not imitate, I have not affectedly differed.

Johnson's treatment of Milton is unmerciful to the last degree. He has belaboured that great poet's character with the most industrious cruelty. As a man, he has hardly left him the shadow of one good quality. Churlishness in his private life, and a rancorous hatred of every thing royal in his public, are the two colours with which he has smeared all the canvas. If he had any virtues, they are not to be found in the doctor's picture of him, and it is well for Milton, that some sourness in his temper is the only vice with which his memory has been charged; it is evident enough that if his biographer could have discovered more, he would not have spared him. As a poet, he has treated him with severity enough, and has plucked one or two of the most beautiful feathers out of his muse's wing, and trampled them under his great foot. He has passed sentence of condemnation upon Lycidas, and has taken occasion from that charming poem, to expose to ridicule (what is indeed ridiculous enough) the childish prattlement of pastoral compositions, as if Lycidas was the prototype and pattern of them all. The liveliness of the description, the sweetness of the numbers, the classical spirit of antiquity that prevails in it, go for nothing. I am convinced, by the way, that he has no ear for poetical numbers, or that it was stopped by prejudice against the harmony of Milton's; was there ever any thing so delightful as the music of the Paradise Lost? It is like that of a fine organ; has the fullest and the deepest tones of majesty, with all the softness and elegance of of the Dorian flute. Variety without end, and never equalled, unless perhaps by Virgil.

Little men are so; and little poems should be so; because, where the work is short, the author has no right to the plea of weariness, and laziness is never admitted as an available excuse in any thing. Now you know my opinion, you will very likely improve upon my improvement, and alter my alterations for the better. To touch and retouch is, though some writers boast of negligence, and others would be ashamed to show their foul copies, the secret of almost all good writing, especially in verse. I am never weary of it myself, and if you would take as much pains as I do, you would have no need to ask for my corrections.

I considered that the taste of the day is refined, and delicate to excess, and that to disgust that delicacy of taste, by a slovenly inattention to it, would be to forfeit at once all hope of being useful; and for this reason, though I have written more verse this last year, than perhaps any man in England, I have finished and polished, and touched and retouched, with the utmost care.

Robertson and Gibbon disgust me always, Robertson with his pomp and his strut, and Gibbon with his finical and French manners.

With the unwearied application of a plodding Flemish painter, who draws a shrimp with the most minute exactness, Pope had all the genius of one of the first masters. Never, I believe, were such talents and such drudgery united. But I admire Dryden most, who has succeeded by mere dint of genius, and in spite of a laziness and carelessness, almost peculiar to himself. His faults are numberless, and so are his beauties. His faults are those of a great man, and his beauties are

such, at least sometimes, as Pope, with all his touching and retouching, could never equal.

I wonder almost, that as the Bacchanals served Orpheus, the boys and girls do not tear this husky, dry, commentator, Johnson, limb from limb, in resentment of such an injury done to their darling poet. I admire Johnson, as a man of great erudition and sense, but when he sets himself up for a judge of writers upon the subject of love, a passion which I suppose he never felt in his life, he might as well think himself qualified to pronounce upon a treatise on horsemanship, or the art of fortification.

Beattie is the most agreeable and amiable writer I ever met with: the only author I have seen whose critical and philosophical researches are diversified and embelished by a poetical imagination, that makes even the driest subjects, and the leanest, a feast for an epicure in books. He is so much at his ease too, that his own character appears in every page, and, which is very rare, we see not only the writer, but the man: and that man so gentle, so well tempered, so happy in his religion, and so humane in his philosophy, that it is necessary to love him if one has any sense of what is lovely.

I have read six of Blair's Lectures, and what do I say of Blair? That he is a sensible man, master of his subjects, and, excepting here and there a Scotticism, a good writer, so far at least as perspicuity of expression, and method, contribute to make one. But oh the sterility of that man's fancy! if indeed he has any such faculty belonging to him. Perhaps philosophers, or men designed for such, are sometimes

born without one, or perhaps it withers for want of exercise. However that may be, Dr. Blair has such a brain as Shakespeare somewhere describes, "dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage."

Blair has crept a little farther into my favour. As his subjects improve, he improves with them, but upon the whole I account him a dry writer, useful no doubt as an instructor, but as little entertaining as with so much knowledge it is possible to be. His language is, except Swift's, the least figurative I remember to have seen, and the few figures found in it, are not always happily employed. I take him to be a critic very little animated by what he reads, who rather reasons about the beauties of an author than really tastes them, and who finds, that a passage is praise-worthy, not because it charms him, but because it is accommodated to the laws of criticism, in that case made and provided.

A letter is written as a conversation is maintained, or a journey performed, not by preconcerted means, a new contrivance, or an invention never heard of before, but merely by maintaining a progress, and resolving, as a postillion does, having once set out, never stops till we reach the appointed end. If a man may talk without thinking, why not write upon the same terms?

For the Literary Magazine.

A LITERARY LADY.

MOST men are desirous of being thought learned; but there was a time, when learning was thought to reflect, not honour, but some degree of discredit on the female sex.

Strange caprice and perverseness of fashion! To spell badly was inexcusable in a man, but some ladies placed a kind of honour in mis-spelling; and there are illustrious women on record, who thought it necessary to their good name to counterfeit an ignorance which they had not, and knowingly to commit blunders in style and spelling, at which a school-boy of ten years old would have blushed.

The controversy about the relative merit of the sexes has been carried on, of late years, with a good deal of vivacity. The advocates of women have relied chiefly on certain arguments drawn from the omnipotence of custom and education. What women are, say they, custom and education has made them: change the modes of education, and the sex would be found capable of all the meritorious qualities hitherto esteemed the property of men.

The defenders of the opposite opinion do not deny great influence to education, but they maintain that the prevailing modes of education are such as to afford occasional scope for all the powers and capacities inherent in the sex. A great number of women enjoy opportunities for displaying judgment, taste, invention, and sagacity, in intellectual matters, equal to those which men enjoy. They think that nothing in our modes of education will explain why women have not been inventors or improvers in any of the sciences; why, even in the arts of painting, music, sculpture, architecture, poetry, no women have been eminent as authors or composers; why there is no female name which bears any comparison with Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon, in history.

Perhaps, when we mention history, the reader may remind us of Mrs. M'Cauley. I do not recollect any historical writer, among European women, but Mrs. M'Cauley, and her name cannot be supposed to do her sex any very great honour.

The following picture of Mrs. M'Cauley is a short, but very forci

ble sketch, which I have just met with in the newly published correspondence of John Wilkes :

I saw her, says this lively writer, in a letter to his daughter, yesterday. I found her, with her husband, very ill indeed, and raving against France, and every thing in that country, f , from which she had just returned. She even says their soups are detestable, as bad as Lacedemonian black broth, and their game insipid, all their meat bad, and their poultry execrable. Yet she says, that she dined at some of the best tables, and was infinitely caressed. She saw Dr. Franklin, but refused his invitation to dinner, for fear of being confined on her return, in consequence of the suspension of the habeas corpus act. "Lord Jesus Christ, Mr. Wilkes, you know I am very fond of partridges; I saw them often served up, but could not eat them, I found them so hard and illflavoured." I staid with her near an hour, in which time I believe she exclaimed twenty times," Lord Jesus Christ!" She was painted up to the eyes, and looks quite ghastly and ghostly. She has sent away her English woman, and has only a French valet de chambre and friseur, at which the reverend doctor is indignant, and with whom the English servants already quarrel.

It is a little remarkable, and not a little honourable to our native country, that America has produced a woman, who makes no contemptible figure in the historical field. I allude to Hannah Adams, whose personal character is as much superior, in propriety and dignity, to that of Mrs. M'Cauley, as her productions are superior in solidity and usefulness.

For the Literary Magazine.

0.

ON THE CHARACTER OF SIR

WILLIAM JONES.

THERE are few men of the present age, to whose memory more

love and admiration have been paid than to that of sir William Jones. There is a kind of competition among his survivors, which shall be most lavish of his veneration. While his erudition excites the astonishment of some, his poetical genius awakens the idolatry of others. The eloquent praise of a third set of admirers is called forth by his legal and political pre-eminence; while a fourth bestows upon his head the honours due to the patriot and philanthropist, the friend of his God and of mankind. His great literary reputation would atone for many social and moral defects; but sir William Jones was no less eminent for the integrity, purity, and mildness of his private manners, than for the extent and variety of his intellectual attainments.

I have seldom been more pleased than in contemplating a portrait drawn by one of his most rational admirers. His life, according to this pourtrayer, was, from his earliest youth, not only unstained by those excesses which are generally excluded by a passion for letters, but was distinguished for all that manly and varied activity, which so rarely escapes the languor of academical retirement, while it was adorned by the polished manners and elegant accomplishments, still more frequently neglected by the man of business and the scholar.

He seems chiefly remarkable for the union of this gentleness and modesty of disposition, with very lofty notions of his own powers and destiny. Without any presumptuous confidence in the force of his genius, or the vigour of his understanding, he thought nothing beyond the reach of his industry and perseverance. From the very commencement of his career, accordingly, he tasked himself very highly; and having, in early youth, set before his eyes the standard of a noble and accomplished character in every kind of excellence, he never lost sight of this object of ambition, and never remitted his exertions to reach it. Though born in a condition far from affluent,