Merodach's royal widow hastes to cheer Had shed his white snows. Behind him stream'd Fast by the rod, which bloom'd o'er Aaron's name, He spake, and thus the reverend seer replied. "Thy promises, and threats, presumptuous king, My soul alike despises ; yet, so wills That spirit, who darts his radiance on my mind, Ne'er has it borne, since first it left the trunk, "Prophet of evils! darest thou pour on me "Go to the shady vales of Palæstine, Vain prince, or Syrian Lebanon, and tear The palms and cedars from their native mould Uprooted; then return, and break this rod. Believe me, far more arduous were the task : For it was harden'd in the streams of heaven; And though not dedicate to sorcerers' arts By magic incantation, and strange spells; Yet such a potent virtue doth reside In every part, that not the united force Of all thy kingdom can one line, one grain, Of measure, or of solid weight impair. Wilt thou that I revoke thy destined fate? Devoted prince, I cannot. Hell beneath Is moved to meet thee. See the mighty dead, The kings, that sat on golden thrones, approach, The chief ones of the earth. O Lucifer, Son of the morning, thou that vaunting said'st, "I will ascend the heavens; I will exalt My throne above the stars of God; the clouds Shall roll beneath my feet," art thou too weak As we art thou become like unto us? Where now is all thy pomp? where the sweet sound Of viol, and of harp?' with curious eye Tracing thy mangled corse, the rescued sons Of Solyma shall say, 'Is this the man That shook the pillars of the trembling earth, That made the world a desert?' all the kings, Each in his house entomb'd, in glory rest, While unlamented lie thy naked limbs, The sport of dogs, and vultures. Shall these imperial towers, this haughty queen, That in the midst of waters sits secure, Fall prostrate on the ground. Ill-ominous birds Shall o'er the unwholesome marshes scream for And hissing serpents by sulphureous pools [food; Conceal their filthy brood. The traveller In vain shall ask where stood Assyria's pride : No trace shall guide his dubious steps; nor sage, Versed in historic lore, shall mark the site Of desolated Babylon." Thus spake The seer, and with majestic step retired. In that day FROM BOOK IV. The City of Babylon having been taken by the Army of Cyrus, Belshazzar is found in his Pleasure Garden, and slain. WITHIN the walls Of Babylon was raised a lofty mound, Sigh'd for her Median home, where nature's hand Had scoop'd the vale, and clothed the mountain's side With many a verdant wood; nor long she pined Forthwith two hundred thousand slaves uprear'd Now the glad sound of loud triumphal notes, Sweet social intercourse, but think, O think, FROM BOOK VL After the Capture of Babylon, the Jews having been permitted by Cyrus to rebuild their Temple, they reach Jerusalem-Renew the Feasts-Lay the Foundation of the Temple-The old Men weep. Now dawns the morn, and on mount Olivet Sees unembodied shades, by fancy form'd, Of Joppa down they heave their stately trees SIR WILLIAM JONES is not a great poet; but his name recalls such associations of worth, intellect, and accomplishments, that if these sketches were not necessarily and designedly only miniatures of biography, I should feel it a sort of sacrilege to consign to scanty and inadequate bounds the life of a scholar who, in feeding the lamp of knowledge, may be truly said to have prematurely exhausted the lamp of life. He was born in London. His father, who it is said could trace his descent from the ancient princes of North Wales, and who, like his son, was no discredit to his lineage, was so eminent a mathematician as to be distinguished by the esteem of Newton and Halley. His first em. ployment had been that of a schoolmaster, on board a man-of-war; and in that situation he attracted the notice and friendship of Lord Anson. An anecdote is told of him, that at the siege of Vigo he was one of the party who had the liberty of pillaging the captured town. With no very rapacious views, he selected a bookseller's shop for his share; but finding no book worth taking away, he carried off a pair of scissors, which he used to show his friends, as a trophy of his military success. On his return to England, he established himself as a teacher of mathematics, and published several scientific works, which were remarkable for their neatness of illustration and brevity of style. By his labours as a teacher he acquired a small fortune; but lost it through the failure of a banker. His friend, Lord Macclesfield, however, in some degree indemnified him for the loss, by procuring for him a sinecure place under government. Sir William Jones lost this valuable parent when he was only three years old; so that the care of his first education devolved upon his mother. She, also, was a person of superior endowments, and cultivated his dawning powers with a sagacious assiduity which undoubtedly contributed to their quick and sur prising growth. We may judge of what a pupil she had, when we are told that, at five years of age, one morning, in turning over the leaves of a Bible, he fixed his attention with the strongest admiration on a sublime passage in the Revelation. Human nature perhaps presents no authentic picture of its felicity more pure or satisfactory than that of such a pupil superintended by a mother capable of directing him. At the age of seven he went to Harrow school, where his progress was at first interrupted by an accident which he met with, in having his thigh-bone broken, and he was obliged to be taken home for about a twelvemonth. But after his return, his abilities were so distinguished, that before he left Harrow, he was shown to strangers as an ornament to the seminary. Before he had reached this eminence at school, it is a fact, disgraceful to one of his teachers, that in conse. quence of the ground which he had lost by the accident already mentioned, he was frequently subjected to punishment, for exertions which he could not make; or, to use his own expression, for not being able to soar before he had been taught to fly. The system of severity must have been merciless indeed, when it applied to Jones, of whom his master, Dr. Thackery, used to say, that he was a boy of so active a spirit, that if left friendless and naked on Salisbury Plain, he would make his way to fame and fortune. It is related of him, that while at Harrow, his fellow-scholars having determined to act the play of the Tempest, they were at a loss for a copy, and that young Jones wrote out the whole from memory. Such miracles of human recollection are certainly on record; but it is not easy to conceive the boys at Harrow, when permitted by their masters to act a play, to have been at a loss for a copy of Shakspeare; and some mistake or exaggeration may be suspected in the anecdote. He possibly abridged the play for the particular occasion. Before leaving Harrow school, he learned the Arabic characters, and studied the Hebrew language, so as to enable him to read some of the original Psalms. What would have been labour to others, was Jones's amusement. He used to relax his mind with Philidor's Lessons at Chess, and with studying botany and fossils. In his eighteenth year he was entered of University college, Oxford, where his residence was rendered more agreeable by his mother taking up her abode in the town. He was also, fortunately, permitted by his teachers to forsake the study of dialectic logic, which still haunted the college, for that of Oriental literature; and he was so zealous in this pursuit, that he brought from London to Oxford a native of Aleppo, whom he maintained at his own expense, for the benefit of his instructions in Arabic. He also began the study of modern Persic, and found his exertions rewarded with rapid success. His vacations were spent in London, where he attended schools for riding and fencing, and studied Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. He pursued in theory, and even exceeded in practice, the plan of education projected by Milton; and boasted, that with the fortune of a peasant, he could give himself the education of a prince. He obtained a fellowship at Oxford; but before he obtained it, whilst he was yet fearful of his success, and of burthening the slender finances of an affectionate mother for his support, he accepted the situation of tutor to Lord Althorp, the son of Earl Spencer. In the summer of 1765, he repaired to Wimbledon Park, to take upon himself the charge of his young pupil. He had not been long in Lord Spencer's family, when he was flattered by an offer from the Duke of Grafton, of the place of interpreter of Eastern languages. This situation, though it might not have interfered with his other pursuits, he thought fit to decline; but earnestly requested that it might be given to his Syrian teacher, Mirza, whose character he wrote. solicitation was, however, unnoticed; and the event only gave him an opportunity of regretting his own ignorance of the world, in not accepting the proffered office that he might consign its emoluments to Mirza. At Wimbledon he first formed his acquaintance with the daughter of Dr. Shipley, the Dean of Winchester, to which he owed the future happiness of his life. The ensuing winter, 1766, he removed with Lord Spencer's family to London, where he renewed his pursuit of external as well as intellectual accomplishments, and received lessons from Gallini as well as Angelo. It is amusing to find his biographer add that he took lessons at the broad-sword from an old Chelsea pensioner, seamed with scars, to whose military narrations he used to listen with delight. The In 1767 he made a short trip with the family of his pupil to the Continent, where, at Spa, he pursued the study of German, and availed himself of the opportunity of finding an incomparable teacher of dancing, whose name was Janson. In the following year, he was requested by the secretary of the Duke of Grafton to undertake a task in which no other scholar in England was ¦ found willing to engage, namely, in furnishing a version of an eastern MS. a life of Nadir Shaw, which the King of Denmark had brought with him to England, and which his Danish majesty was anxious to have translated into French. Mr. Jones undertook the translation from a laudable reluctance to allow the MS. to be carried out of the country for want of a translator; although the subject was dry, and the style of the original difficult, and although it obliged him to submit his translation to a native of France, in order to give it the idioms of a French style. He was at this time only twenty-one years of age. The only reward which he obtained for his labour was a diploma from the Royal Society of Copenhagen, and a recommendation from the court of Denmark to his own sovereign. To the "History of Nadir Shaw" he added a treatise of his own on Oriental poetry, in the language of the translation. In the same year, he began the study of music, and took some lessons on the Welsh harp. In 1770 he again visited the Continent with the Spencer family, and travelled into Italy. The genius which interests us at home redoubles its interest on foreign ground; but it would appear, from Jones's letters, that, in this instance, he was too assiduous a scholar to be an amusing traveller. His mind, during this vist to the Continent, was less intent on men and manners than on objects which he might have studied with equal advantage at home. find him deciphering Chinese, and composing a tragedy. The tragedy has been irrecoverably lost. Its subject was the death of Mustapha, the son of Soliman; the same on which Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, composed a drama⭑. We On his return to England, he determined to embrace the law as a profession, the study of which he commenced in 1771, being then in his twenty-fourth year. His motives for choosing this profession are best explained in his own words. In a letter to his friend Schultens, he avows at once the public ambition and personal pride which had now grown up with the maturity of his character. "The die" (he says) is cast. All my books and MSS., with the excep tion of those only which relate to law and oratory, are locked up at Oxford; and I have determined, for the next twenty years at least, to renounce all studies but those which are connected with my profession. It is needless to trouble you with my reasons at length for this determination. I will only say, that if I had [* Mallet has a drama on the same subject, but it is still a subject to let.] tion lived at Rome or Athens, I should have preferred the labours, studies, and dangers of their orators and illustrious citizens, connected as they were with banishment and even death, to the groves of the poets, or the gardens of the philosophers. Here I adopt the same resoluIf the study of the law were really unpleasant and disgusting, which is far from the truth, the example of the wisest of the ancients and of Minerva would justify me in preferring the useful olive to the barren laurel. To tell you my mind freely, I am not of a disposition to bear the arrogance of men of rank, to which poets and men of letters are so often obliged to submit." This letter was written some years after he had resigned his situation in Lord Spencer's family, and entered himself of the Middle Temple. In the mean time, though the motives which guided him to the choice of a profession undoubtedly made him in earnest with his legal studies, he still found spare hours to devote to literature. He finished his tragedy of Mustapha, and sketched two very ambitious plans; the one of an epic poem, the other of a Turkish history. That he could have written a useful and amusing history of Turkey, is easy to suppose; but the outline, and the few specimens of his intended epic, leave little room for regret that it was not finished. Its subject was the discovery of Britain; the characters Tyrian, and the machinery allegorical, in the manner of Spenser. More unpromising symptoms of a poem could hardly be announced. In 1772 he published his French letter to Du Perron, the French traveller, who, in his account of his travels in India, had treated the University of Oxford, and some of its members, with disrespect. In this publication, he corrected the French writer, perhaps, with more asperity than his maturer judgment would have approved. In the same year he published a small volume of poems, with two dissertations; one on Oriental literature, and another on the arts commonly called imitative. In his Essay on the Arts, he objects, on very fair grounds, to the Aristotelian doctrine, of the universal object of poetry being imitation. Certainly, no species of poetry can strictly be said to be imitative of nature except that which is dramatic. Mr. Twining, the translator of the "Poetics," has, however, explained this theory of Aristotle pretty satisfactorily, by showing, that when he spoke of poetry as imitative, he alluded to what he conceived to be the highest department of the art, namely, the drama; or to the dramatic part of epic poetry, the dialogue, which, in recitation, afforded an actual imitation of the passions which were described. When Mr. Jones had been called to the bar, he found that no human industry could effectively unite the pursuits of literature with the practice, of the profession. He therefore took the resolu tion, already alluded to in one of his letters, of abstaining from all study, but that of the science and eloquence of the bar. He thought, however, that consistently with this resolution, he might translate "The Greek Orations of Isæus, in cases relating to succession to doubtful property." This translation appeared in 1778. In the interval, his practice became considerable; and he was made, in 1776, a commissioner of bankrupts. He was at this time a member of the Royal Society, and maintained an epistolary correspondence with several eminent foreign scholars. Among those correspondents, his favourite seems to have been Reviczki, an Oriental scholar, whom he met in England, and who was afterwards the Imperial minister at Warsaw. From the commencement of the American war, and during its whole progress, Mr. Jones's political principles led him to a decided disapprobation of the measures of government which were pursued in that contest. But though politically opposed to Lord North, he possessed so much of the personal favour of that minister, as to have some hopes of obtaining, by his influence, a seat on the Bench of Fort William, in Bengal, which became vacant in the year 1780. While this matter was in suspense, he was advised to stand as a candidate for the representation of the University of Oxford; but finding there was no chance of success, he declined the contest before the day of election; his political principles, and an "Ode to Liberty," which he had published, having offended the majority of the academic voters. During the riots of 1780, he published a plan for security against insurrection, and for defence against invasion, which has since been realised in the volunteer system. During the same year, he paid a short visit to Paris; and, at one time, intended to have proceeded to America, for a professional object, namely, to procure for a client and friend the restitution of an estate, which the government of the United States had confiscated. The indisposition of his friend, however, prevented him from crossing the Atlantic. On his return to England, he recurred to his favourite Oriental studies, and completed a translation of the seven ancient Arabian poems, famous for having been once suspended in the Temple of Mecca; as well as another poem, in the same language, more curious than inviting in its subject, which was the Mahomedan law of succession to intestates. The latter work had but few charms to reward his labour; but it gave him an opportunity for displaying his literary and legal fitness for the station in India to which he still aspired. Besides retracing his favourite studies with the Eastern Muses, we find him at this period warmly engaged in political as well as professional pursuits. An") Essay on the Law of Bailments,” an "Address to the Inhabitants of Westminster |