Enthusiasm, with the strong wing, and the kingly eye of the eagle-the meaner ferocity of the kite-and passionate dreams, soft as the pinions of a dove-and broken touches of melody, more melting than the music of nightingales. Most strange, most unintelligible of men! what glimpses of more than earthly happiness must he have experienced, when, in the glory of his strength, he tossed from him for a time his besetting infirmities, and allowed his free spirit to soar and hover at its will! What more than mortal anguish, in the degradation and subjection of that which was capable of so aerial a flight-the imprisonment of the King of the Air! What wonder, that when mean thoughts festered in his nobler soul, he should have deemed all men traitors to his li berty, and poured his burning curses on them through the self-raised bars of his visionary dungeon! Alas! how easy to condemn, how difficult to sympathise in, the abberrations of such a spirit!

The gentle, inflexible, intellectual David-the most consistent of men-how should he have been the friend, the companion, of this phrenzied enthusiast? How could these men have understood each other?-their very eyes speak languages which have scarce two words in common.

In infidelity-the only point of their agreement, Hume was far more different from Rousseau, than half the Christians in the world are from half the infidels. They fought against different parts of the system, and they fought with different weapons. There was more danger by far to be dreaded from the Scot than the Swiss. His onset, indeed, was not attended with so much of the spectacular and imposing circumstance of combat-his troops were of a more still and quiet disposition, but they made their attacks with more cunning skill, and the effects of their impious triumphs have been far more durable and deadly. The high and lofty parts of man's na ture, which Rousseau audaciously enlisted against the Bible, struggled, for a season, with all the clamours of determinate warfare; but they are the natural allies of that which they assaulted, and throughout the world they have long since returned devoutly to their old allegiance.

In Scotland, for I am still here, the nature of the conflict, has, I fear, corrupted even those that fought on the right side. Religion is too exclusively defended by arms of the same kind with those which attacked her. But I have no room at present to enter upon this.

P. M.

LETTER X.

TO THE REV. D. WILLIAMS.

DEAR DAVID,

I TOLD you that Mr Scott sent me a letter of introduction to Mr Men the Man of Feeling, and I need not tell you, that such an introduction to such a man, was as agreeable a circumstance as any that could have fallen in my way. I made all haste to deliver my credentials, but was told, when I called at his house, that the old gentleman had gone out a-riding. I really had no expectation of hearing his absence accounted for in that way, for I had always been accustomed to think of him as of one who had entirely outlived his contemporaries, and who must, therefore, be long past the years of active exertion. My surprise, however, was an agreeable one, and I prepared myself to find the veteran, when I should have the fortune to see him, a yet more interesting person than I had taught myself to look for.

Yesterday morning I received a note from him, in which he apologized for not having immediately returned my call. He was extremely busy, he said, all the morning, but hoped I would come and dine with him in an unceremonious manner, the first day I found myself disengaged. I had half promised to dine at a tavern with one or two young gentlemen, friends of W; but my curiosity was such, that I forthwith excused myself in that quarter, and accepted Mr Ms invitation for the same day on which it reached me. I assure I assure you, that I should not have grudged my journey to Scotland, although I had laid up nothing to bring back with me, excepting the recollection of this one day..!

As I walked in the direction of his house, with the certainty that a few minutes would bring me into his company, I was conscious of an almost superstitious feeling a mysterious kind of expectation-something like what I can conceive to have been felt by the Armenian, when the deep green curtain hung before him, the uplifting of which, he was assured, would open to him a view into departed years, and place before his eyes the actual bodily presence of his long buried ancestor. I had read his works

when yet in the years of my infancy. The beautiful visions of his pathetic imagination had stamped a soft and delicious, but deep and indelible impression on my mind, long before I had heard the very name of criticism; perhaps before any of the literature of the present age existed certainly long, very long, before I ever dreamt of its existence. The very names of the heroes and heroines of his delightful stories, sounded in my ears like the echoes of some old romantic melody, too simple, and too beautiful, to have been framed in these degenerate overscientific days. Harley-La Roche-Montalban-Julia de Roubigné-what graceful mellow music is in the well-remembered cadences And I was in

-the " παλαιων ὀνοματ' ονειρων ! truth to see" in the flesh" the

hoary magician,

whose wand had called those etherial creations into everlasting being. A year before, I should have entertained almost as much hope of sitting at the same table with Goldsmith, or Sterne, or Addison, or any of those mild spirits so far removed from our nature “ οι νυν βροτοι εσμεν.” For the first time in my life, I could not help being ashamed of my youth, and feeling,

C

as if it were presumption in me to approach, in the