man ever lived, who knew better what men are susceptible of than Walpole; yet his delineations are very little to be trusted. They are lively,' bitter,' ' epigrammatic,' and 'concise;' any thing rather than implicitly true. He hated Lord Hardwicke, despised the Duke of Newcastle, disliked the Pelhams, abhorred Pulteney, contemned the Duke of Cumberland, detested his uncle, and despised his nephew. His characters of those persons, therefore, are not to be relied upon; yet it is not the less true, that no man, more than he, knew what men in elevated life are capable of. It is one thing to know, and another to apply. He had small notions and narrow views, was ever meddling in small matters, and wrote a tragedy, which no woman can look into, and which no man of common delicacy could have written; yet which many puerile,-I will not say corrupt,-critics have compared to the Edipus of Sophocles. Mons! Mus!

Walpole had little insight into the characters of ele-vated minds; but of weak and superficial ones he had more than a competency of knowledge. Knaves and fools he could hit off to the life; but most others he spelt backwards, as it were; and yet so artfully, that, by the many, he has been regarded as an exceedingly great. authority! And wherefore?—because he was a master of the ridiculous, and put the worst constructions upon all men's actions.

As a poet, he had no power of touching the passions or filling the imagination; as a romance writer, he has passed from the admiration of the young; as a critic, he may be judged of by his low appreciation of Thom

son and Akenside. The character of his mind was, in fact, like the character of his heart;-fastidious, artificial, and capricious; and he played with the reputations of men and women as a cat plays with a mouse.

III.

WHO SEE FAMILIAR OBJECTS LATE.

I HAD heard of, and read of, the death-watch all my life; and yet I never heard the tickings of one till I was fifty-two. To see things all our lives, and never to examine them, is common enough. Who has not beheld daisies and buttercups all the days of their lives? and yet scarcely one man in ten thousand has examined either; and, as to knowing to what classes and orders they belong, you may as well ask the names of them in Coptic, Hebrew, or Sanscrit.

In Switzerland, the Tyrol, among the Apennines, and the valleys intersecting the Pyrenees, the clouds frequently form over, and a stranger would be inclined. to inquire, where are the mountains of which I have heard so much? There are none to be seen! We may even travel through the whole of them, and not once see their summits. This seems to me to be truly the case with those, who traverse the world from infancy to age, and never see, as it were, more than the feet of the mountains.

This is one of the many reasons why life appears so dull, after a certain round is compassed. Objects and pursuits lose their interest; the blood circulates slowly; and a lamentation is heard, that life is of little or no

value; yet where virtue is, life is most precious. When the mind has once been opened to the secrets of the universe, there is always something to enjoy; and the prospect of a magnificent future becomes a reward for every evil that is past. Vain man! Your apathy, or your affliction, arises, not from any legitimate want; but from the circumstance that the pleasures of the senses can no longer be adequately enjoyed. A faithful knowledge of the uses, to which life may be devoted, is as much to be appreciated before the capacity of the senses, as invention and design, composition, expression, and character, are to be preferred in a painting, to colouring, chiaro-oscuro, and execution.

IV.

WHO SEE DOUBLE-SHORT-SIGHTED PERSONS.

GOLDSMITH relates, that a fly's eye having been placed in a manner to admit its being seen through by means of a microscope, it was discovered, that the power it 'possessed of multiplying and diminishing objects was 'incalculable; so that a single soldier appeared, when ' viewed through it, a whole army of soldiers *.'

One would think, that some men had eyes of this

* In the common fly are seen two small round projections at the 'side of the head. These projections contain many thousands of 'lenses disposed in rows, each one of which is capable of transmit" ting an impression of outward objects. A German naturalist ' counted 6236 in the two eyes of a silk-worm. Another naturalist ' counted 14,000 in the eyes of a drone fly; and 27,000 in the eyes ' of a dragon fly. It has been proved by actual experiment with 'the help of glasses, that each one of these lenses was capable of

kind, and some exactly the reverse; for they exaggerate or diminish numbers in a very extraordinary manMillions in their algebra being tens, and tens

millions.

Persons of short sight and of imperfect hearing lose many common enjoyments, both of nature and art. Johnson saw with difficulty, and his auricular organs were imperfect. This was the true reason why he had little taste for painting, and none for music. Even beauty was lost upon him; and nature herself blushed, or looked green, without eliciting a single smile of admiration. Many are the evils arising out of imperfection of hearing and shortness of sight!

V.

WHO LOSE IN EFFECT BY LIVING IN PRIVACY.

Ir is natural for some minds to love and to solicit retirement. It was a prevailing appetite, in my younger days; to which some were more immediately invited by Zimmerman's well-known work on solitude.

This desire, however, does not appear to belong solely to that period; for the Abbé St. Pierre says, that he remembered to have heard old Segrais remark, that

receiving an independent and distinct impression. The inference 6 seems necessarily to be, that the retina of these insects may re6 ceive, at the same time, some thousands of impressions without any confusion; which is far more wonderful than the single im

pression made on the retina of our own species, and on those of ' other animals, who have two eyes with a retina for each.'—Acad. Imp.

most young people of both sexes had, at one time of their lives (generally about seventeen or eighteen years of age), an inclination to retire from the world. He 'maintained this to be a species of melancholy, and hu'morously called it the small-pox of the mind; because scarce one in a thousand escaped the attack. I myself,' continues he, had this distemper; but am not 'much marked with it.'

This appetite governed Wollaston, author of the celebrated work, entitled 'The Religion of Nature de'lineated.' Though an ardent admirer of Nature, Wollaston lived in London so strictly, that he was not absent from his own bed one night during a period of thirty years. He lived calmly, quietly, and remote from almost every species of altercation; confining himself to a few friends, and a certain routine of study; embracing the art of throwing off prejudices, and tracing the power and nature of causes and consequences. His delight in privacy, however, had two evil effects; it engendered a modesty and a timidity, which made him appear in company much less learned and scientific than he really was; and it gave men, far his inferiors, an opportunity of triumph, to which they were in no respect entitled. Secondly, it left him, in a great measure, alone during the latter part of his life; and he was doomed to feel the consequences of having neglected the wisdom of cultivating the acquaintance of men younger than himself. His death, however, was calm, resigned, and composed. His Religion of Na'ture delineated' is a fine work; but the activity of science will soon cause it to be alluded to more often than read.