tres and pedestres, or horse and foot races. It is true that all those feats and performances were practised among the Greeks; but the credit of linking them with the arts and sciences is due to the moderns, who have added several others of their own invention; such as fire and stone eating; donkey racing, gaming, duelling, calculating the long odds, quizzing a flat, and dressing in style. Our pugilists, players, operasingers and dancers, whips, and blacklegs, have all acquired, or assumed, the appellation of professional and scientific persons, and have almost wholly superseded their predecessors in the patronage of great men; and the reason of this too is obvious enough. Philosophy can be of no use to men, who have ceased to think or reason for themselves, except in the article of patience under their losses at play, and even that has given way to the bottle; all the strength and cunning of rhetoric could not parry a straight forward hit from the arm of Belcher, or Mendoza; mathematics are become so familiar, that one of our stylish whips can imprint all the problems of Euclid, with his coachwheels on the sand, perform a curve within an

inch of the edge of Dover Cliffs, or cut out a fly's eye with his whip as it perches on the horse's ear; and our blacklegs can calculate with the same mathematical precision, the speed of horses, or the quantum of brains of the flats, whom they mean to take in; poetry has no merit but from the repetition of the players, as we value a talking parrot, but disregard the skill and perseverance of the man who has taught the bird to articulate: and as for painting, sculpture, architecture, and music; every person of fortune and fashion is a connoisseur without science, taste, genius, eye, or car.

As the ancient arts and sciences daily become more obsolete and uscless in this enlightened age, fashion invents new ones; and if these were not, like the inventress, too revolutionary to allow the moderns time to improve upon them, we should hear no more of the so much vaunted excellence of the ancients, and the Universities would be shut up, or converted into boxing schools, or receptacles for Authors and other lunatics.

The worst traits in the character of the modern arts and sciences are that, as they depend

on fashion, and are acquired rather by slight of hand than exercise of brains, fools and knaves make a greater proficiency in them than sensible men, and have industriously beset all the avenues to them, so that a man who has a wish to be initiated, must keep the most abandoned company. Fashion, though a goddess, is a fool, and all her worshippers, or rather slaves, are nincompoops, as may be readily proved from the circumstance, that no one article of common sense was ever found in the catalogue of fashion. Men of sense despise it, but many of them have the weakness to suffer themselves to be drawn into its vortex either through the fear of ridicule, or the vanity of associating with the great. There cannot be a more dis tressing sight than to see a man of sense and fortune so engulphed. He gives up himself and family a prey to the most infamous villains, and seldom lias the courage to withdraw till he involves in his own ruin all those who have placed a suflicient confidence in his honour and honesty to entrust him with their property. A man who sports with his own property, is a fool; but he, who risks that of others, is a

villain. When his ruin is completed, as it must assuredly be, for no man who plays upon the square can be equal to a knave who secretly practises, and puts in play every cheating art, it is a hundred to one but he thinks himself happy to be admitted to associate with those who have destroyed him, and whom he once despised, to draw others into the same toils which have proved his own destruction, and live on the spoils-if living it can be called, where a man exists only to know himself infamous.

Can any thing be more foolish-more inhuman-more criminal, than staking the expectations in life, the honour, the very bread of a man's own family, and too often of many others, on the speed of a horse, the throw of dice, the turn of a card, or the event of a pugilistic contest between two worse than brutes? What else is gaming, and is not gaming the foundation of all the modern arts and sciences?

Is it not equally foolish, inhuman, and criminal in a man to ruin his own family, and those of the tradesmen with whom he deals, by following the most ridiculous fashions, which carry him beyond the limits of his income, whether it ho

by intriguing with opera girls or actresses, associating with coggers of dice, packers of cards, or mere swine who drink till they drown reason and probity?-Do not these follies and vices degrade the dignity of human nature, and sully the highest rank? Are riches and poverty the criteria of folly and vice, and are not the same things foolish or vicious in rich, as well as poor, -in princes or pig-drivers?-But I will not insult the understanding of the Reader by waiting for an answer.