it in our descriptions must still sooner disappear. We cannot expect that any one can long deplore the sorrows of another." This last observation contains an indisputable truth, conveyed in a vein of satirical humour, and reminds the reader of a saying of the knowing writer of Gulliver's Travels, when he addresses those around him on his bed of sickness :

Ye formal weepers for the sick,
In your last offices be quick,
And spare my absent friends the grief

To hear, yet give me no relief.

Expired to-day, entombed to-morrow,

When known, will save a double sorrow.

Cicero's and Lord Chesterfield's Letters to
their Sons.

Both these works contain precepts to instruct a young man in the duties and practices of life; and both are written to the sons of their respective writers. Cicero's advice on all occasions is full of noble sentiment against vicious indulgences of all kinds, and the most manly exhortations to cultivate those virtues which tend to render a man an example of probity, honour, and true patriotism. On the contrary, my Lord Chesterfield's Letters palliate, if they do not recommend, every sensual

pleasure; and the whole body of letters is a system of selfish depravity. Posterity will hardly believe that one writer was a heathen philosopher, and the other a christian nobleman, famed for his talents in a very brilliant æra of English literaturę.

Theocritus.

In his Pastorals, Pope has made an alteration, much for the better, of an image in the Greek. Theocritus introduces a lover wishing to be turned into a bee, and to buz about the chaplet which surrounded the head of his mistress; a wish surely not very attentive to the tranquillity of the lady, however it might have been gratifying to the lover. Pope has introduced a more pleasing guest into the arbour of his mistress:

Oh! were I made, by some transporting power,
The captive bird that sings within thy bow'r,
Then might my voice thy list'ning ears employ,
And I those kisses he receives enjoy.

Pastoral ii. l. 45.

I am sorry to disagree with the ingenious and amiable Author of the Essay on Pope, &c. where the wish in Theocritus is praised for its "tenderness and elegance," and preferred to the passage

* Idyll iii. 1. 12.

in our Pope's Pastoral. "Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas," must be my excuse.

A Vulgar Error.

There prevails in the world a miserable cant with regard to the poet, viz. that he is born so, and does not become one by art and study. A poet* has said so, and succeeding poets have not been unwilling to render the wreath of poesy sacred to mystery and jargon. Let us break into this conjurer's circle, and tell him a plain unvarnished tale. A man whose mind is turned to poetry must, and often does, cultivate this faculty, with every method in his power, as he would (with due encouragement) any other art to which his turn of mind inclined him. Poetry, like every plant, must be well nurtured, or it will not be better than a weed; and though thriving indeed, but weak, and of a bad colour and odour!

An Elegant Compliment.

M. Menage relates, that he told his servant one morning to deny him to all visiters, as he was engaged in his study. "M. Carpentier called on

* Homer in his Odyssey.

me," says Menage, "and he was, according to order, refused admission; but hearing his voice I ran after him, and bringing him back I said, My dear friend, I did not mean to exclude you, for a man of letters can never interrupt a man of letters." --Menagiana.

Orators

Seem to resemble poets in one striking circumstance, viz. their power of influencing our minds without the aid of reason, and perhaps better without it. Gibbon, the historian and orator, depends more on his faculty of talking than arguing. M. Buffon, the great animal historian, covers his dubious facts, and his more dubious inferences, with the splendor of his oratory and Voltaire, by his wit, (a kind of short-hand oratory,) shews that a very easy and beaten path opens to persuasion, which lies very far apart from reason, and has often joined his brother bard in the utterance of some rational queries.

How shall my debts be paid, or can my scores
Be cleared with verses to my creditors.

Hexameter's no sterling, and, I fear,

What the brain coins is scarcely current there.
Can metre cancel bonds? is there a time
Ever to hope to wipe out chalk with rhyme?
Or if I now were hurrying to a gaol,

Are the Nine Muses held sufficient bail?

Randolph's Poems, 1638.

Note. This merry bard, who was the author of a dramatic piece, "The Muses' Looking-Glass,” died young, after a life of intemperance, and negligence, and want.-Chalmers's Biog. Dict.

Laurence Sterne.

The reader of the Sentimental Journey, by this author, if he has either sense or delicacy, must be very sorry that a man capable of writing with such true pathos, should have condescended to vitiate his claim to elegance and pure sentiment by any obscenity. "Exemplum vitiis imitabile decipit," says a writer of very excellent taste; yet] Sterne, who seems to have read Rabelais con amore, had not virtue or good feeling enough to avoid an imitation of his favourite author, in a work where the reader could least expect such an impropriety, not less hostile to the writer's taste than his morals. If, as Pope very justly observes, Immodest words admit of no defence, As want of decency is want of sense;

a still stronger objection lies against an author who endeavours, under the guise of raising your best affections and sentiments, to seduce you by vicious representation: it is transplanting, by a legerdemain trick, the statue of Priapus to the pedestal of an Apollo, or the celestial Venus.

* Horace.